


Dave and Jade's Adventured in Gogdamned F***ing Wonderland

by Sifl



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alice in Wonderland, Dave talks way too much, F/M, We're All Mad Here, Wordplay, figurative language is literal
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-06-12
Updated: 2012-06-12
Packaged: 2017-11-07 14:17:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 22,086
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/432079
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sifl/pseuds/Sifl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>As seen on ff.net- Dave and Jade visit their own personal Wonderland. Dave isn't happy about it, especially because his sicknasty rambling metaphors have a tendency to actually become reality- and the citizens of Wonderland aren't too happy about their arrival, either! Between Dave's filthy mouth and Jade's size-changing spacewitch shenanigans, Wonderland's gone even madder than usual!</p><p>With the help of the Cheshire Karkat Vantas, John the mouse, the "AMAZING SHAPESHIFTING PRINCE ERIDAN WHO WAS ONCE A BABY AND IS NOW A PIG BECAUSE DAVE STRIDER COULDN'T KEEP HIS F***ING YAP SHUT", and many other familiar faces, they must find the rabbit Liv Tyler if they want to leave!</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Hi! Hussie has been making Alice jokes in canon, so I thought, "IT'S A SIGN!" and posted this here, too. :) Please enjoy!

Dave often wondered why the hell he let silly little girls drag him into all the shithole situations that they encountered- all of them- but before he could ever figure out the reason, he'd find himself jack-deep in another one of the figurative pits with no explanation linking him from how he got from point a to point b in the elaborate task of jumping through shithole-hoops that he participated in almost daily.

He was like a one-man circus, what with all the sweet catches and dude dodges and acrobatic-fucking-pirouettes he did just to keep Rose and Terezi from peeling his psyche from him like a monkey peels the skin from the banana to get to the flesh beneath.

He told this gem of an analogy to his sister in the half-serious, half-joking asshole brother's classic lilt that Rose had declared his tone to always take whenever she was getting close to unwrapping some secret Dave discovery. She looked up from the book she was reading and responded to his banana simile, "I am stripping you of your defenses, quite. But a banana is rather phallic, isn't it?"

"Yeah, well, your book is gay and phallic."

"Phallic? At some points, most likely. But that is natural for a romance, particularly one aimed at heterosexual females. Also, Jane Austen's imagery is probably not going to be focused around something so, how shall I put this?" Rose glanced at Kanaya and Terezi, who were holding their own Pride and Prejudice books identical to their human friend's (except Terezi's had the additive and Zombies as well as several distinct slobber stains), and her painted lips quirked into a smirk, "For a strong, idealized male protagonist and love interest, Austen wouldn't fixate on literary stand-ins for Eros that could bruise so easily."

"Whatever, bananas are awesome. Don't be dissing my bunches." Dave held his ground and wondered how much farther he could push the innuendo without actually piquing the curiosity of his two troll companions and running the risk of explaining- in detail- what he and Rose were bantering about.

However, Rose wasn't inhibited- the backlash was all primed for her brother, not her. She mercilessly pushed his coolkid limits in this little contest of sibling rivalry. "Bananas for emotions? Maybe. But for anything else, bananas are too… _tender and soft_ ." She leered at Dave. "And Mr. Darcy isn't so narcissistic that he would be fixating upon something that resembled himself so closely."

Dave fought the urge to turn as red as his irises, but he could feel his ears mutiny so he could only follow suit and retreat. "Fuck you, sicko," he spluttered.

"Oh, I'm sure I don't have the tropical flavor you are looking for, dear brother, although the genealogy of fruit is certainly as incestuous as such a forbidden relation would be. And such an idea makes you the "sicko", I do believe."

She then curtly went back to reading her book so that Dave had to sit and stew over his swift defeat and try not to encourage the confused and intrigued stare Terezi was giving both himself and his sister.

He could practically feel the teal troll's liberal giggles pouring out of her mouth along with a, "Hey Dave, why are you a banana? I like bananas, but I always thought you were more of a candy apple or maybe a cherry" because she didn't have a clue about how humans worked or how low of a blow his sister had dealt. But luckily for him, a distraction suddenly presented itself and the fruit basket turnover of a conversation he so dreaded was averted.

Liv Tyler bounded across the grass and disappeared into the brush at the bottom of the hill the group of four children had situated themselves on followed by a pair of red-slippered feet attached to an unbelievably shiny mass of black hair.

Dave shifted out from under the parasol protecting Terezi and himself from the sun and shouted, "Hey hound dog, it ain't rabbit season yet! What's goin' on?"

She didn't even look back at him before she followed the little bunny into the bushes. A little miffed, Dave leaned back out of the sun, grateful that Terezi had forgotten her question and was once again completely content to lick her zombified book like a lollipop.

A few minutes later, Dave heard a sound off in the distance that reminded him of the bang of Jade's rifle. He stood up and paced forward.

"What the hell was that?"

Rose calmly looked up. "What was what? I didn't hear anything."

"There was a shot. In the distance."

"When?" inquired Kanaya.

"Just now. How did you miss it? Terezi, I know you're blind and shit, but you aren't deaf like these broads. You heard it, right?"

Terezi pursed her distinctive lips and cocked her head to the side. "Nope." Her tongue flicked out like a lizard's to test the air. "Don't taste or smell anything weird, either."

"Whatever, I'm going. You girls can stay here with your heads in your little gay porn books. Or," he looked at Terezi through his sunglasses, "Or your tongues. Actually, just," he held up his hands to hold Rose's oncoming jibes at bay, "I don't even know. Keep an ear out in case I'm, you know, actually right about something going down in the woods."

He scuttled down the hill and ignored Terezi's cry of "Bring me back some cherry Kool-Aid!" in favor of following the much softer shouts sounding from deeper in the woods.

"Yo, Jade! Jade! Hey! The rabbit done died yet?" He called. "'Cmon, Harley, answer me!" When she didn't he only became more persistent. "Narcolepsy isn't an excuse anymore, sweetheart, you're over that bullshit." He started some bullshit of his own for his one-sided conversation. "There's no playing ninepins or SBURB with the dwarves, either. Nope, no Rip Van Winkle for you- instead you just play Ghostbusters with a bunch of trolls and salamanders and nobody goes to sleep for a fuck ton of years, no sir."

A few more minutes passed and Dave began to get worried.

"Hello, will the real Jade Harley please stand up? No? What? You can't? You've fallen in the well? Shit, Jade, you can't do that- you're Lassie in this equation. Who the hell is going to tell me where you are if you can't do it yourself? Whuzzat? You can't get up? Should I call Life Alert?"

He jumped over a little stream and moved a few tree branches out of his way. "I hear there's a furry convention over at the Humane Society as part of some new fundraiser-"

Suddenly, a hand slapped over his mouth and Dave's twisted boy-humor was halted in its tracks.

Jade Harley was the owner of the hand, of course, and she drew it away and put a finger to her lips to tell him to be quiet. "That bestiality joke you were going for there was really gross, but everything else was funny."

Dave opened his mouth to retort but Jade held up her hand again. "Ah ah! No talking. We've got a rabbit to catch." Little Liv Tyler gave a small wave from a few feet in front of them both.

Again, Dave tried to ask her why since Liv didn't look like she was running, but Jade pressed her palm over his mouth again. "Shoosh! You'll scare it."

He moved his head. "The hell I-"

Jade made a strict face. "No words!"

"But—"

"I said no words!"

"Then why-"

"Because!"

"Because wh-?"

"There's no time to explain!"

"Dude, I'm the knight of-"

"Dave, please just do what I ask you!"

He pouted (with that coolkid deadpan) and crossed his arms and kept his lips shut. He also cocked out his hips and impetuously put his foot forward in the arrogant "fine-I-don't-give-a-shit-I'm-too-cool-for-this" way that he always did and watched his friend while pretending to make it look like he wasn't waiting for her to say, "Jump!" so he could ask, "How high? Because I am the big man and I HASS the rock and the court is ON FIRE and I can go as high or as low as you want." But he was, and it was a good thing, too, because this particular silly little girl was the one that made Dave traverse through what were by far the shittiest shithole-circus-hoops that ever existed and he needed to be ready to jump higher than over the moon at a moment's notice when he was with her.

Once, he had played a magical game of some destruction because she had a dream about it and said it was destined that they play it, and so that is what they did.

She said it, and even though he thought he wasn't going to, he did it. Or he tried his damnedest and fell on his ass while he attempted whatever absurd task she had inadvertently set him up for. But the point was he always ended up doing as she told him and that was all there was to say on the matter, really.

It still was. Even now Dave felt himself falling into a brand-new pit trap because of the scheming mind of the green-eyed girl who ultimately snatched him from his pouting pose (she was stronger than he was and when it came to making Dave cut his childish act short, she was simply the best there was) and dragged him after the mechanical bunny. Liv gave a small hop and scuttled deeper into the woods before it suddenly bounced, flipped in the air like a character in a cheesy Kung-Fu movie, and disappeared into a messy hole gaping out from beneath a tree.

Dave's eyes widened and he valiantly tried to hold his ground as his plucky companion practically dove for the hole.

"Woah, Jade! Woah, girl! Heel!"

It was to no avail. He dug his feet into the ground, but he only succeeded in creating two smaller craters that ended and merged with the third and largest one, the same one that Dave found himself being dragged into.

Today's figurative shithole was literally a hole and he hoped to whatever higher power he had not met, denounced, pissed off, or tried to kill (assuming it existed) that it was not actually full of shit.

Down the rabbit hole he and Jade tumbled- it uncomfortably bumped them in a rhythmic staccato that suspiciously reminded Dave of the familiar and repetitive chafe flights of stairs gave him- and after what felt like an eternity, it unceremoniously deposited them into a long hallway with many doors, like the world's longest apartment hall. It twisted about as he tried to get a good view of it as he and Jade rolled along, but it wasn't until he felt himself hit the wall at the end of the tunnel and held a sudden meeting between his posterior and the ground that he could put his head on straight and look around.

But, as always, he neglected the setting in favor of running his mouth. "Damn, Harley, were you even looking where you were going?" He sat up and adjusted his glasses. "I could've seriously lost my cool and that would have been catastrophic. Hearkened the end of the world, for real this time." He looked around but didn't see her. Had he managed to lose her again already?

"Dave," he heard a squeak from below him, "I'm pretty sure I asked you not to say anything! But can you please get off of me?"

He looked down to see that Jade had broken his fall with her body. "Shit, Jade, you okay? I didn't realize you were down there. See, remember what I meant about that Lassie comment? You can't be the one falling the fuck down because-" He scrambled off of her and leaned back down to help her up, but instead he was pushed back up with another set of her fingers over his mouth.

"You are worse than Karkat at keeping your mouth closed sometimes, you know?"

Dave visibly bristled for a moment before he accepted Jade's implied challenge with a growl and peeled her hand off of his mouth and used it to pull her up.

"Thanks," she said, stretching her back and looking around. "This is a really neat place, huh?" She held up a pointed finger. "That's rhetorical, Dave. Just use your eyes to look and nod "yes" or "no"."

He really wanted to say, "What if the answer is "maybe"?" but he didn't. Instead he just shrugged.

"Aw, Dave, don't be like that! We're going to have lots of fun if you just trust me and believe that the world isn't as gloomy as your glasses make it!"

He just shrugged again. The hall wasn't unlike the one in the apartment he and his Bro had lived in, except the doors weren't all uniform in size. "What the hell," he muttered. "Are we in a building made for mice?" He kneeled down and put his eye to the keyhole of the tiniest door he had ever seen. "The keyhole is practically as big as the door. Damn," he griped.

Jade came over and put her chin on his head. "Daaave," she sighed, "I keep telling you not to talk! Why don't you ever think about what you are doing before you start running your mouth? You need to save your words for when they are important! If you keep using them like they're worthless, pretty soon they will be! They won't have any weight!"

Honestly, the constant chiding for him to be quiet was getting on his nerves, but he was inclined to do as she asked since she put her arms around his waist and tugged him into a backwards-hug. He tried to lean backwards and relax into her, but he quickly learned that Jade's hug was hardly a sign of affection. She tightened her grip and hoisted him up to his feet.

He screwed his face into a less-than-stoic frown and planted his hands firmly on his hips while she took a big, ornate key from her pocket and placed it into the keyhole.

"See," Jade said as she fiddled with the door, "This key probably opens this door. So if you give me a second, I'll open it for you and we can see what is inside! I wonder what it could be. But let's not guess! We should save it to be a surprise. Surprises are usually wonderful, if you look at them from the right perspective." The door loosened with a small click and Jade gently tugged it open and pressed her face into the doorframe. After a moment, she pulled back and beckoned to her friend.

He hemmed and hawed and acted disinterested while she stared at him with her big, eager eyes. Finally, he couldn't take it anymore and joined her on the ground, trying his best to mask the curiosity that was leaking out from under his sunglasses.

The miniscule door acted as a window to the most vibrantly-colored garden he had ever seen. A thicket of magenta water lilies gathered together in clumps over water so blue and serene that it looked like blown glass right down to the little waterfall it trailed into. The crystalline stream filtered in and around patches of saffron daffodils and white roses so pristine that they reminded both children of sunlight being directed off of a mirror. Next to them, orange marigolds peeked out with celadon stems amongst a tangle of violet vines that continued around on the ground and up the gilded trunks of the manicured trees framing the whole picture. Above the emerald canopies of their leaves (all sculpted to resemble various objects of suspicious familiarity to Dave, though he couldn't quite remember what they were, exactly) draped an indigo sky littered with snowy clouds.

Jade pressed her face next to Dave's and giggled as they both looked through to the secret garden. She felt his expression change to one of awe from against her cheek but didn't say anything about it- he would stop the instant she pointed out that sometimes something as uncool as a garden could make him happy. He would stop letting the wonder seep through him and then he would start trying to regain his coolkid act by spouting nonsense and he'd ruin the magic. Instead she nudged him with her shoulder to send the message in a different way, a way that he didn't have to bother with trying to deny. He playfully pushed back in good-naturedly reluctant agreement and continued to look at the garden while she edged away and turned to watch him.

He was a funny guy, that Dave, in that he felt like he always had to say one thing even if he meant another. Especially if he meant another, actually, but his nonverbal cues were so clear that the words from his mouth meant almost nothing in comparison to the ones from the rest of him.

Amused, she continued to watch him with his mouth slightly open and his head turned a little to the side, like she imagined he must've done when he was much younger and his Bro hadn't fully instilled the rule of cool onto anything besides his eyes. Eventually, he noticed that she was staring at him and his gaze flitted from the rainbow of a scene before him and to her.

He turned his body so she could no longer see his scarlet iris through the side of his glasses and sat cross-legged, silently asking her, (What the hell are you staring at, Harley? I know I'm irresistible but don't be shy, come on up and ask for a picture with me. It'll last longer and then you can copy it and sell it to all of your furry friends for an ungodly sum of money. Yeah, I'd do that for you. Come and be my paparazzi, lady. Say Gaga.)

She laughed and egged him on, so he cocked an eyebrow and brought up his hands as in, (Hey, are you saying I'm not some kind of a sexual fantasy for all your rabid fur friends? Harsh, Jade, harsh. You didn't even break that one to me gently- my dream of being Mickey Mouse's pin-up boy will forever be a mere fantasy. Damn. Sonic the Hedgehog is never calling me back, is he? What a fucking tease.)

Jade fell over in a fit of laughter, sending her skirts all around her in a pool of fabric. She could hear his deadpan facetiousness in her head and his subtle visual cues only added to the clarity.

He gave a triumphant smirk and returned his arms to their neutral position in the crook of his forearms and biceps. With a flick of his chin, his attitude changed completely. (That's enough bullshit. Where the fuck are we and what are we going to do about it?)

Jade pulled herself back up and smoothed out her dress. (When had she changed out of her godtier outfit? The red slippers and striped socks were familiar, but she had definitely not been wearing an apron and the witching gown surely was not full of so much lace and ribbons every other time he had seen it.)

"Dave, I know you're a little bewildered, but I'm sure things will turn out fine. The little bunny and I were playing a game of tag and I shot a rock it threw at me and… you followed me, and now we're here!

(That explains jack shit.)

"Aw, don't be like that. We're here now, so we ought to make the best of it!"

He opened his mouth to reply, but she stopped him. "The rules here are different, Dave. Besides me, efurrybody will take you literally and that won't turn out well.

Dave leaned his neck forward to prepare for a snide comment, but pulled himself out of his slouch and realized, (Jade, you did not seriously just say, "efurrybody", did you?)

Instead of gracing him with an answer to the furry comment, she motioned to the garden. "Shall we go in?"

He tightened his lips and looked at the mouse-sized door. (Hup. Damn. Love to, but unfortunately I am not one of your "efurrybodies" named Jerry. I ain't fitting in there, and even if I could, my coolkid mojo would get stuck in the doorframe and hold me there like Mary holds the frickin' Christ child to her breast. I'm like God's gift to the world except I'm dying for your sane rather than your sins, apparently, and therefore there is no way I can fit through this door.)

Immediately, Jade's face adopted a mischievous grin that reminded Dave of John way too much for his liking. "I am the Witch of Space, silly coolkid!"

Within Dave's head, Jade's solution to the problem clicked. (Nonsense, pagan. I'll burn you at the stake), he'd have mocked had he been speaking.

Already, Jade had shrunk herself down and stood at the doorway, waiting. "Go drink the thing I left for you over there," she called, pointing to a little glass container on a table nested between two of the larger-sized doors. "But don't drink all of it! Just a few sips!"

With a feigned air of indifference, Dave excitedly scrambled over and took the bottle in his hands. The shape was familiar and Dave turned it over and discovered that the stopper was carved into the shape of a stem. He forgot Jade's warnings to keep his mouth shut. "Apple juice. Wonder if John is gonna tell me somebody pissed in it. As if," he chuckled to himself, and prepared to do what the bottle asked in the swirly green writing on the little parchment leaf until he heard a little voice whisper into his ear.

"Hey, d'you think Howie Mandel got his hands on that after Jade did?"

Startled, Dave whipped his head around to see a goofy, buck-toothed smirk made to match the one Jade had been sporting not moments before, except this one was on the face of what he assumed to be the world's largest flying mouse. It dipped and bobbed just above his shoulder and gave a little wave.

"John?" Dave questioned.

"I dunno, am I?" He gave a goofy laugh and flapped his big ears to move his body above the apple juice container in his friend's hands. With a plop, he sat himself upon it and snatched the label out of Dave's fingers.

"So it says, "Drink Me!", huh? I don't know if you should. Little Monsters are everywhere. Might be pee."

"John, we have had this conversation before. Not everything in this world relates back to your stupid movies and how people urinate into juice containers."

"Movies? What movies? You're the one who mentioned movies. In fact, you're the one who started talking about pissing in apple juice, not me!

"Yeah, well, whatever. This apple juice is one hundred percent juice. Actually, it's more like one hundred n' fifty percent juice. So juicy that it makes Juicy Juice cry tears of its own inadequate juice in a sad, sad effort to make up for their lacking percentage."

"You sure? You seem kind of hesitant to me."

Truth be told, John the mouse had inspired doubt in Dave- not directed at Jade, of course, but at the juice itself. What if the John-mouse, hoping to engage in the one thing sacred to all that is bromance (that thing is colloquially and technically referred to as "fucking with each other"), had popped open the bottle and relieved himself inside between the time that Jade had placed it there (when HAD that been, exactly? It could have been days ago, for all he knew!) and the time that Dave had picked it up.

Still, in this unspoken bromantic contest of who was the bigger jackass, John for tricking Dave into drinking pee (or for NOT drinking apple juice) or Dave for having the brusque guts to drink either substance in the face of a grinning cheese-chucker, Dave could not back down. It did not matter that the odds were against him- his pride as a boy depended upon him being the most foolhardy moron in the room.

"Whatever, this is so not pee."

"Hey, I'm just trying to help you out. I don't know if it is or not, either. Just thought it would be the best bro thing to do, warning you and all."

Damn that John Egbert. Damn him and his dewy eyes and innocent charm. Damn him to fucking hell and then un-damn him because Dave was too fond of him to actually leave him there with his damned "best bro" sincerity face. Dave mentally cursed him as he sneered and plucked the little mouse off the glass apple by the spindly tail poking out from the back of its blue breeches. "This isn't piss and you know it. You're just trying to trick me with your sweet talk and your big blue derpass eyes."

John stopped squirming long enough to blink at Dave from behind his glasses and flutter his eyelashes. "Oh, Dave, I'm swooning."

"John, you've been swooning ever since you met me. So have I. Unfortunately, both of us were swooning over the same person and that person happens to be the outrageously awesome guy holding you by the wormy tail. Now, I'mma drink me this apple juice that totally isn't piss and I'm gonna drink it all in one go so that you can see just how much of a failure your prank was, oh ghosty trickster." He unceremoniously dropped John onto the table, removed the cork, closed his eyes, hesitated, completely threw Jade's instructions to take a few sips to the wayside, and...

...downed the entire contents of the bottle.


	2. Chapter 2

The amber substance was sweet and obviously apple juice, but John's piercing stare made it leave an aftertaste that reminded Dave of the flavor of ammonia and cowardice that burned the back of his throat as it travelled downwards in an agonizing trickle. Slowly, though, Dave got over the nastiness on his palette and a rickety victory smile cracked its way across his face. "See," he gasped, opening his eyes, "not pee."

But instead of seeing John's big doe eyes dominate the room like he had moments before, he looked out to see the largest tree in all of existence, except it had no roots or branches and it extended all the way past his field of view, flanked by another one just like it. To his right was another pair parallel to the first and a great, unidentifiable white thing that sat between the pairs of trees. Neither John nor his innocent stare were to be seen for miles.

"Holy shit," Dave muttered, and he spun around in bewilderment to face a vast and barren stone ground all around.

He was on the floor, he realized. He was on the floor and about the size of a beetle and _holy shit he was on the floor and the size of a beetle!_ The apple juice had made him shrink! In fact, those big, endless trees weren't trees at all, but the legs of the table he had been leaning on seconds before and the barren stone tundra around him was the tile of the twisted apartment hall. He puzzled over what the great snowy mound beneath the table was, but he couldn't riddle it out.

A sudden strong breeze knocked Dave from his thoughts and on his back with a disquieting thud accompanied by a furry mass about ten times as large as he was dive-bombing into the ground few feet from where he sat. It scuttled over to sniff him, nails making violent clacks on the ground like the claws of Godzilla on the streets of Japan. "Dave?" John's voice boomed.

Alarmed, Dave backed up like a crab until his hand landed on the familiar roughness of paper. Casting his eyes down in surprise, he discovered that he was sitting next to the big white mound he had been looking at a moment before and he had crushed the little note that had been folded to stand in front of it. It read:

"Dave- if you drink too much apple juice…"

He looked in the direction of the pale, spongy mass again and realized that there was another piece of enormous parchment nestled into it that continued the message of the smaller note.

"…EAT ME!"

Lucky for Dave, Jade new he was going to screw up and had made concessions for it. He scrambled over to the mound of what was presumably some kind of food and, remembering how drinking too much apple juice had made him become smaller than a mouse (and hoping to avoid putting his tongue too deep into bird crap or something equally unpleasant), only barely licked the outside of the whatever-it-was and watched as the world around him warped and resized.

Hm. Frosting. The white thing was a cake.

It was a little disorienting, but he could now definitively say that the apple juice was a shrink drink and the food was the opposite- he was now standing beneath the table and next to a cake that (currently) was the height of a full-grown man and about five times as wide (from Dave's perspective.) John, who was bounding over on all fours, now only reached Dave's shoulder when he was standing up and the Strider boy couldn't help but revel in this opportunity to pronounce himself the current dominant one in the bromance dance. (This "dance" is something necessary to all humans, almost akin to the strange Trollian quadrant rituals of Alternia, but it is distinct in that it combined the non-sexual aspects of the kismetic and moirallegic quadrants, thereby creating an entirely new box in the relationship chart. It can best be described as the Joker's suit, and like the fifth quadrant of John Egbert, it is rarely acknowledged or even heard of.)

"Hey, yo, Egbert, the AJ wasn't piss."

John's normally innocent face burned away to reveal the true prankster within- the grin was rotten to the core and deserving of one meant to represent the suit of spades- and said, "Of course not, numbnuts. I just thought it was funny to watch you freak out. I mean, really, Dave, those shades hide absolutely nothing that isn't already obvious."

Time to play his ace in the hole. "Hey Egbert, want some cake?" Dave grabbed his friend by the ear and shoved his spectacled face in the direction of the giant, sugary confection. "I think Jade said it was Betty Crocker," he lied.

With a phenomenally fitting squeak, John's upper buck teeth clacked against their bottom set in surprise and he began to wriggle out of Dave's grasp. "Dave, you wouldn't DARE!" The windy little mouse flapped his great ears and sent Dave into the air and hurtling into the cake. "Betty Crocker is evil and her cakes reek of pestilence and famine and unrealized dreams. And also shaving cream. But that might just be my dad's cakes…"

While John was off on his tangent, Dave gathered up a ball of the frosting and bready sugar and hurled it into his friend's babbling mouth.

"Hugghhghhgh bluh! Bluuuuh!" he cried as he gagged on the pastry and grew to be three times Dave's size. Freshly re-proportioned, John whirled around and his long tail whizzed overhead, shaving the top off the cake like a wind propeller would behead an unfortunate (and/or stupid) goose.

Dave discovered too late that this was definitely not one of his smarter moves. He dove and rolled between John's legs and tried to steady the poor rodent as the latter dramatically reenacted what looked like some kind of homage to William Shatner, screaming what sounded like the name of the titular bad guy from Wrath of Kahn.

Alas, as John was giving his one-word monologue, Dave only succeeded in pushing his furry friend forward and into the cake instead of away from it.

"Oh, shit, John, you okay?"

The only answer he got was a loud roar and the ruined cake tossed on top of him. He crawled out from under the wreckage (surprisingly heavy for such a fluffy dessert), but John was on him like white on rice (or perhaps frosting on cake, if we want to stay thematically correct.)

Now, John's hatred of Betty Crocker was well-known, but the lengths the bake-hating boy would go to exact revenge upon those who would force him to eat cake against his will had never been observed firsthand; the bucktoothed boy-mouse's latent anger exploded and Dave, the first victim outside the Egbert household, trembled as he gazed into the dilated pupils of the enraged rodent as he literally crammed pawful after pawful of chocolate cake and vanilla frosting down the blonde's throat. "Let's see how you like it, knave! I have everything and you have nothing!"

(It is always the nice, quiet ones, isn't it?)

Fortunately, Dave grew to be twice his normal-human size after several pieces travelled down his gullet, so his mouth and throat were large enough to be able to accommodate all the cake he was being force-fed without making him choke. John simply moved himself and the ruined confection onto Dave's chest and continued shoveling, causing Dave to keep growing until he would have dwarfed a totem lathe, had one been handy. Dave quickly got fed up with the situation (pun intended) and used his newfound imposing size to push John off of his face and stop his body's cake-induced expansion. With a grunt, he sat up, grateful that this magical hallway had an abnormally tall ceiling, and trapped the dog-sized Egbert between his hands as if he were a normal enormous mouse and not one hell-bent on starting a food fight.

He raised the squirming rodent to his eye level. "Now look," Dave tried to reason, but the remnants of John's temporary insanity still had a hold over him and he hurled the remaining part of the cake (John was comparatively small in his current state, but he still had the mangrit to haul something bigger than he was into the air, dammit) past Dave's lips and into his esophagus and so the blonde boy's mass swelled to an impossible size.

What happened next was a result of magical science beyond the understanding of normal mortals and only heroes of space would be able to describe every nuance of it in clear and accurate detail, but for our purposes, the only thing you need to know is that the hallway was not large enough to contain a growing cake glutton of our hero's size and Dave's head was screaming in pain and he felt like the world was closing in on him. It hurt and a few tears leaked their way out from behind his eyelids and fell from beneath his glasses, splashing onto the ground. They kept coming as John added to the agony of the slowly-increasing pressure by biting Dave's fingers, each salty droplet becoming bigger and bigger as they tumbled out of his tearducts and to the ground.

Put simply, Dave was growing much too big to fit into the hallway and the effect it had on his body was akin to the effect a compressor has on recycled cans. He was being crushed and it hurt badly enough to make him cry.

He felt himself heave as the bone-crunching pain made him collapse into himself and as the acidic forewarning to vomit spread itself over his teeth and tongue, he had the strangest sensation that it was apple juice and not spit coating his mouth…

…and miraculously, the pain quickly receded and he felt himself return to normal size. His body shrank upwards to where his head was rather than down to his feet (perhaps because he had been pushing upwards and outwards in an attempt to break through the wall before it broke through him) and he felt John fly away from his grasp as he dangled momentarily in midair before plummeting downwards.

The next thing Dave knew, a giant pool of water broke his fall to the floor and the flavor of sadness and salt filled his mouth. But the only sources of liquid he knew about (besides the apple juice bottle) were his own two eyes and it took him a moment to fully comprehend the situation.

 _Oh my God,_ he thought, _I'm literally drowning in a river of my own tears. I've gone mainstream. Mother fucker._ Mentally, he added "self-loathing" to the list of things the water tasted like.

And there was a lot of the water, too; Dave's agonized eye-rain had been shed when he was a giant and was not a part of him that shrank back down with its body of origin. It now filled the hallway and meandered down it in a lazy but constant current that enveloped and pushed him downwards, blurring the lights above him.

He struggled to reach the surface and for a moment he thought he wasn't going to make it, but a pair of familiar arms wrapped around his chest and he felt himself being pulled upwards at an alarming speed.

While Dave and John had been discussing the dangers of wiz in apple juice, Jade had taken a look into the garden, picked a bouquet of flowers, and then exited to discover Dave's predicament just in time to save his ass.

Rather, she came out just as the first of Dave's crocodile tears had hit the ground and scrambled around in a panic to avoid being hit. When they didn't stop falling, she learned that he was being crushed and focused her innate space powers to shrink him back to his ordinary human proportions.

She shook her head in disappointment as she dragged her reckless charge back to the water's surface.

The point of the juice and cake had not only been to test how reckless and irresponsible he would be when given free reign over a set of powers that were not his (and he did prove her hypothesis that he would be just as liberal with them as he was with his own abilities- Dave was a known cheater when it came to manipulating time), but it was also to allow him to grow and shrink without her help and explore a little of his own accord.

She had even left a smaller bottle of apple juice and a miniature dessert in a box next to the much larger one (the one that Dave had been forced to devour by a tricky little mouse) so that he could take some with him if he needed. But it had washed away with everything else in the room (including the bouquet she had picked moments ago- and it had been so pretty!) now, so it didn't matter.

She broke the ocean surface and shifted Dave in her arms so he could breathe a little better. What was a poor girl to do with this idiot?

Well, first things first. "John," she called, "Can you lead me to the shore? I have to carry this one."

With a twitch of his whiskers and a flap of his ears, John floated down to them, his innocent mental state restored. "Oh, man, I am so sorry," he stuttered. "I-I-I don't know what came over me. I just… he made me eat cake, so I got mad, and then I started to see messages and I just had to… I had to OBEY." He whimpered. "Oh, Dave, I'm sooo sorry!"

"'Sokay, Egderp, it's cool. I deserved it, I guess." Coolkid gave a cough and Jade used her abilities to reduce his density in relation to the water so that it was easier to hold him afloat. "Yo, Jade, I can swim on my own now, I think."

"No, you can't," she said matter-of-factly. "John, shore?"

"Oh! Uh, right. We can get out of the hallway and to the island if we go…" he whizzed in a few circles before pointing in midair like some kind of mouse-canine hybrid. "…this way!" he flapped a few feet forward but stopped suddenly, as if he were electrified. "I can carry you guys on my back! You can change my size, right?"

"John, that is the one of the best ideas you have had in the time I have known you. Yes, please," Jade said.

She amplified his dimensions so that he was big enough to carry them both. When that was done, he extended one long, floppy ear to the pair in the water while the other kept him airborne.

"Dave, I'm reeeeeeeaaallly, really sorry I made you cry," John said as he used his oversized ear-wings to dump his friends onto his back.

"You made me cry? Ha! Those were tears of joy 'cause the cake was so delicious." He shivered as his soaked body made contact with the biting wind.

John snorted. "Are you saying that evil incarnate is delicious? Well, that's your opinion." He gained some altitude before guiding the three of them on a bobbing path towards an open window at the top of the hallway that Dave hadn't seen before.

"Devil's food is the best cake," he retorted.

"Y'know, if I didn't know better, I would find your affinity for evil cake pretty ominous."

"Yeah? Well, maybe it is."

Swiftly, Jade jabbed him in the ribs and leaned over to whisper into his ear. "Dave," she told him, "I'm not just trying to be obnoxious when I tell you to not talk! If you keep telling lies and half-truths, even when you are joking, everything you have to say will lose its weight here! That's bad!"

John's cute dumbo ears perked up. "Jade, I couldn't hear you. Was that directed at me? I don't want to be nosy."

Immediately, Jade patted her friend's side and Dave could tell that she was going to basically tell John that the blonde was acting like a child. Since he was feeling especially sore at both of them (one for attempting to give him Death by Cake and the other for treating him like some goddamned damsel in distress), he cut her off. "She said that the only thing more ridiculous than a mouse you can ride like a horse is a horse you can carry like a mouse." (Little did Dave know that this miniature mouse-horse actually existed!)

John had a sense of humor, rodent or not, so Dave's miffed tone left him unscathed and he giggle-squeaked in agreement at the absurdity and did a midair somersault, at which Dave panicked and nearly let liquid escape out his other end (and the liquid would definitely not have been apple juice anymore), but Jade's secure grip on his waist helped him keep it together.

"Holy shit, Egbert, are you trying to kill us? Why are you so stupid?"

At that, he felt John droop and Jade put her hand on the back of Dave's neck. "I try not to be stupid…"

"That's it, I am sitting in front." Jade shrank down, climbed over Dave's hair, and unshrank herself so that she was closest to her mouse-brother's head. Before she took the reins, though, she had stopped on Dave's nose and scolded him privately. "Even people who know you well in the real world are inclined to take everything you say at face value! Being called "stupid" is the worst thing for John and you know that! You may not mean it, but he thinks you do- you're down the rabbit hole now." She sighed and leaned so that her tiny forehead rested against his. "I hope you do what I say before you find out that all the insults you fling will come back and hit you. And right now, they are still weighted, so they'll hurt."

"Why do you keep using that same figure of speech?" He grumbled as he wrapped his arms around her once she returned to his size. "Is it overuse-the-figurative-speech day today, or something? We better call Rose and tell her to stay indoors 'cause this atrocity will offend her tender sensibilities. She'll get on her high horse about what is and isn't effective syntax and shit and start Word War volumes one through seventeen, complete with author commentary to take up a whole 'nother seventeen volumes."

Jade tried to stifle her laughter and tell him off, but her delivery was lacking. "You bet. But you better hope you don't go against her because she'll have the superior vocabulary on her side. Coolkid might get burned!"

Dave cool-smiled (meaning that he gave the ghost of a smirk that could only be detected by means of a heat-seeking device and a magnifying glass used in conjunction with one another) and slouched forward so that he was buried in Jade's hair. When she had miniaturized herself, the water trapped on her had sloughed off, leaving her completely dry. Her body heat was a great comfort to the still-soaked Dave and he stifled any thoughts about how uncool it was for him to hold onto her. "So what if she uses "malarkey" and "falderal" instead of "horseshit" or "brouhaha" instead of "clusterfuck" or "non compos mentis" instead of "cray-cray"?" He let his smile erupt onto his face since he was completely hidden. "There will be no burning and thawing for me, thank you. Dave Strider will remain an untouchable ice sculpture, like if Michelangelo had a boner for frozen water and not a hard-on for stone. I can take on Rose's fancypants blathering any day." He shivered into her hair to illustrate how chill he was, but they both knew that the gesture was an unironic coincidence. He was just cold.

Unexpectedly, John's head snapped around and his ears caught the wind like two giant rudders so that he sent them all in a corkscrew pattern upwards. "You think you can take on Rose?"

Dave's shit-eating grin threatened to rear itself from behind Jade and spout a few riddles, but the force of their steed's whirlwind tangled the girl's hairbow around him and kept him silently rooted to the spot. "Forget what you heard, John. Dave is being incredibly silly!"

"But I thought I heard him say-"

"Hey, John, look at all those salamanders down there! They don't look too happy. Is Casey with them?"

Dave squirmed in his seat, but Jade's ribbons still held him fast and in retrospect he was glad that they did- at the mention of Casey, John tore out of the circles he was flying in and plummeted to the area Jade had pointed.

There were more than just salamanders gathered along the little island that had appeared out of Dave's ocean of tears- nakkodiles, turtles, carapaces, penguins, and some singularly unidentifiable mass of trembling, waterlogged rage congregated on the shore.

"Gotta dry this up," bubbled a nearby salamander. "But how?"

"How? How? How? Nak nak!" Parroted the red crocodilian creatures.

Dave knocked his head against Jade's in frustration- he did not want to deal with the inane idiocy of his consorts. (Can you shrink the damned water so that these guys can shut up and go away?) He wondered.

Now, Jade was a witch but she was not a psychic. She had no idea what Dave was thinking if she couldn't see his body language nor hear his tone of voice, so she ignored Dave's unspoken suggestions and egged Egbert to land, gracefully dismounting to stand right in the foray of animals.

And like her brother, she possessed a godly strength, so she didn't even notice that Dave was tied to her back and still in the sitting position. John did, but he didn't say anything because he was having too much fun watching Dave wiggle and gesture wildly while Jade calmly and kindly considered the consort's situation as she ignored Dave's own.

She looked like a Disney Princess with an immature monkey strapped to her and the contrast was akin to the degree of absurdity that a professional heavyweight wrestler wearing his daughter's fairy Halloween costume would garner. At first the Strider boy tried to cue the other creatures to untie him, then he kicked his legs out at Jade's sides in frustration, and finally, after John's squeaking snickers were too loud to ignore, he settled for letting his legs go limp and made his hands give dirty gestures to everyone around him.

Jade's appeasement of the unsettled animals (And Dave's constant stream of "fuck you" as told by his fingers) was quickly interrupted by a hiss from atop the island's single tree.

"You both look like a couple of morons." The pile of wet creature that the trio had seen from the sky flashed its eyes at them and bristled.

"Excuse me?" Jade asked, looking towards the tree.

The thing's eyes, two glistening beads of yellow, red, and grey, were full of rage that longed to unleash itself through the shadows and onto the children. Jade felt a little like a piece of firewood amongst a pile of lit torches, like if she took just one step in the wrong direction, the beast's gaze would set her alight and she would smolder forever in the twin circles of glistening flame.

(Dave was oblivious; he just felt like a baby koala.)

"I said you two look like a couple of morons. What, is that thing on your butt actually sniffing your nook right here in public? How shameless can you pink monkeys really be?"

John's laughter finally broke through to end Jade's blank stare and she turned around to see him squirming around on his back and holding his stomach. "What," she held a hand up to feel the back of her skirt, "What are you…?" She froze as she felt her palm brush Dave's wet pants.

He froze too and felt sparks of electricity run straight up from where her hand landed and through his extended fingertips. He also took a moment to thank whatever power that was watching over him (he assumed it to be the same deity that had heard his earlier prayers about negating literal shit being in this rabbit hole) for reminding him to wear a belt today because otherwise, Jade's hand would be groping bare skin.

He tensed and he felt sure that whatever her facial expression was, it matched his hidden one perfectly. In light of the situation, he was grateful for the trouble the bow had given him since it let him hide and hold on to J-

"Are you serious?" scoffed the shadowy creature, derailing Dave's train of thought. "What, were you too busy being transfixed at how brilliant those brainless scalebeasts are compared to you to notice that you had a bloodsucking prick affixed to your back like grubnoodles on a piece of fucking grubhive art?"

"Forgive me, mister grumpypants!" Jade shouted as she shrunk Dave down and caught him and a few stray water droplets as he tumbled out of her hair and ribbons, "I didn't realize that what _I_ do and don't have on me at all times was cause to offend _you_!"

The shadow and its twin pinpricks of light jumped down from the branch it was huddled on and crouched on the ground. "Well, it does. It's my business just like everything else- this whole fucking world is my business because I fucking said so!"

Jade brought Dave to her chest and opened her fingers so he could see their crabby assailant's glistening fury.

"And why do you want everything to become your business? Are you just that nosy or," Dave felt something smooth his now-dry hair and realized that Jade was petting him, "are you jealous?"

The dark thing rose and gave a frustrated growl before it spat, "I am not jealous! Why would I be jealous of him? He's the one who stooped low enough to go hanging all over you like some kind of Earthling version of a digestive tuber worm trying to absorb your nutrition juices before they went streaming out of your waste chute!"

"Karkat, that is absolutely disgusting. At least, I think it is," she said. "But it doesn't matter! I was only trying to help you solve your flood dilemma. You don't have to be so nasty." She gave Dave another pat on the head and cocked her chin to the side. "Why don't you come out of the shadows so we can see you? You look kind of creepy right now."

The figure, now identified as Karkat Vantas (how this wasn't overtly obvious to Dave the instant the troll started yammering, he would never know) shuddered and scoffed. "No fucking way. I don't need to sully myself by letting your shit-slinging gazes dirty my person."

Dave was already perturbed because he was sitting in a puddle and Karkat was only adding to his discomfort. He couldn't keep his mouth shut any longer. "Oh really, Vantas? You wanna play that game? We're only looking in your general direction because you started talking to us, not because we wanted to watch you struggle with some kind of perverse ulterior motives. But you- you have no problem creeping up on us and slinging _your_ …" he thought of the nastiest-sounding troll term he could remember and hoped that it equated to fecal matter, "…your incestuous slurry all over us with your peepers. At least have the courtesy to get a fucking bucket to keep all that in."

John backed him up with an "Ooh, nasty burn!" while Jade tried to shoosh him and gently put her other hand over him.

Karkat's blushing was pretty obvious even from the darkness. "I can't believe you let such a filthy knave sit in your presence!"

Dave shoved Jade's other hand off of him. "Hey, trollshit, learn to pronounce your words right!"

"Dave!" Jade warned.

"Well, oh tiny grubling, are you trying to "school" me?

"Dave can school anyone so long as he isn't trying to rap," John interjected.

"Shut the hell up, Egbert, my raps are amazing and you're jealous."

"Whatever you say. But seriously, don't piss of Karkat. He's really not that bad," John reasoned. "He's like our cool alien that fell from the sky that we have to keep a secret or else the government will come after us. We can feed him Reese's Pieces and-"

Whatever John said, it set the red troll off. "Don't you fucking DARE treat me like a pet! I swear, don't you make me come after you, mouse. Your size doesn't scare me."

Dave may have been the smallest of the four, but his ego was the biggest. "Karkitty, you're bluffing. You ain't gonna do shit."

"You're on my list too, knave!"

Dave ignored the second slip-up between "knight" and "knave" in favor of teasing Karkat and fighting Jade's attempts to quiet him. "You're a scaredy-cat, KK. C'mere, little kitty, kitty kitty!"

With a final screech, Karkat bounded out of the shadows and went straight for Jade's clenched hands. First came a pair of sharp, sickle-like claws, then a tensed pair of arms, and then Karkat's razor-sharp teeth all topped by a pair of distinctive cat ears flicked back behind his horns.

In the few seconds it took for Karkat and his antagonism to cover the distance between the tree and Jade, Dave reveled in how ironic it was that Karkat had literally become a cat.

Jade wasn't so keen on scoping out such vital things as irony, no, she was more concerned with the trifle of saving the miniature Dave's life- he stood no chance against a Karkat who could crush him in his fist. (Not that the cat-troll would; she knew that Karkat did not have the drive to be bloodthirsty like his brethren. If he managed to kill Dave, it would be because he accidentally stepped on him.) With a flick of her wrist, Jade evened Dave's odds against the feline warrior.

John and Dave watched in awe as the raging little lion man shrank down to a mewling and grumpy kitten.

Karkat wasn't so quick to notice his change and so he charged onwards and collided into Jade's foot and began attacking it with all the ferocity a little ball of wet fluff could. "Ouch, Karkat, that hurts!" She said.

Upon discovering that he was gripping a giant shoed foot and the grass came up to his eyeballs, Karkat stumbled backwards and looked up at Jade in confused awe.

Obviously, he had also gotten wet when Dave flooded the hallway (which apparently flooded this entire little world) and, as a painfully self-conscious pubescent would, scrambled up into the tree to hide and dry his soggy self without being ridiculed. Now that he was on the ground and in the light, everyone could see his bedraggled state in full glory- his hair fell around him in a watery mass and his eyes expanded to the size of tennis balls as it dawned on him how pathetic he looked.

To add to the scene, he subconsciously lowered his ears and whimpered, thereby creating a perfectly pitiful picture of a little wet cat.

"Awww, Jade, look at how cute he is!" John exclaimed. "Can we keep him? I know you are more of a dog person, but…"

Karkat's teeth, marred with the curse of troll dental structure, stayed in their eternal neutral grin but his face widened from bewilderment into one of fear as he noticed Jade's dog ears start to twitch and her lips part to reveal her own gums.

It dawned on Dave that Jade was a _dog_ and Karkat was a _cat_ and that was problematic. He began to shake her fingers and clutch at her apron in an attempt to get her to snap out of Bec-mode. "Jade, make him big again. I know he's an ass but you can't drop me and go for him."

"Dave's right!" John interjected, holding his sister by the shoulders.

"I mean, if you wanna put me down somewhere safe first and then go rip him to shreds, be my guest, but-"

"Dave!"

"What? I'm kidding," he replied. "But seriously. Jade, don't hurt Karkat. We need him for the pet shop theme we've got going on here."

"What did I say about being called a fucking PET?" shouted Karkat.

"Be quiet," Jade growled.

"Yeah Strider, learn to keep your mouth shut like she tells you- she's got a good head on her shoulders and she might be able to teach you how to keep yours!"

"I think she was talking to all of us, numbskull," whispered John.

Dave, as much as he loved to banter, had actually been more focused on a way to put a leash on his female friend's more basic tendencies than riling up the helpless kitten on the ground. He scaled Jade's apron like a rock wall (trying as hard as he could to not grab anything other than fabric) and hauled himself up to sit on her head using the same hairbow that had trapped him earlier, knocking off her glasses as he went. Then, he wrapped the plentiful fabric around her eyes (the ridiculous design motifs that had been carried over from her godtier hoodie actually came in handy. Color him astounded) and sat like a shah between Jade's snowy ears. John saw what his friend was doing and wrapped the ribbon's loose ends around his sister's face a few extra times and knotted them together before handing the ends of the impromptu blindfold to Dave.

"That help?"

"I can still smell him. But yes, it does."

He began to scratch her ears and scalp to mimic how she had been stroking him earlier, and she responded to the touch quite nicely. Her ears relaxed and twitched so he could get all sides of them while her body's tenseness resided.

"Can you make Karkat normal size now?" tried John.

She snorted. "If he behaves."

Karkat jumped onto his feet and stamped his left foot. "I will if he will," he shouted, pointing to Dave.

"Yeah?" snickered Dave, still massaging the girl's head, "I'm always behaving. I am always at the top of my game. It's not my fault that you can't rise to the occasion, peewee. You're a failure on the "grow up, don't show up" rule."

"Strider, I'm not even sure I know what chicanery you are implying up there, but I hope you fall down and break your fucking structure rod!"

Dave assumed that was alien-speak for "spine" and scoffed. "I'm the master of the beast right now, dumbshit. The same beast that wants to chase you around that tree until you melt into tiger butter and then use you to grease her pancakes, by the way, so do you really want to be making demands of me like some really shitty villain in some even shittier pay-per-view movie?"

On the ground, Karkat threw a miniature tantrum and paced in circles before pointing an extended, sharp claw at Jade's cranium. "Don't talk down at me! Unlike some bulgelickers, I am capable of acting like a mature adult- and I don't need your hoofbeast excrement!"

John was having a hard time keeping a straight face and he let go of Jade while he covered his enormous mouth.

"So you are basically calling yourself a bulgelicker," Dave reasoned. "I don't know what that means to you, but I find that to be soundin' like some grade-A nastiness right there. Like something so nasty that Jabba the Hut wouldn't even eat it- he'd be all, "Damn, I can't even subject Han Solo to this, it's so nasty. And I fucking hate that guy." And he don't mean sick nasty. Just fucking nasty. Cool it on the self-loathing there, pussy."

Jade shifted a little more when he made reference to Karkat's sudden feline appearance. Maybe he should refrain from doing that again.

"I was calling _you_ a bulgelicker, not me! Don't play dumb with me!"

Finally, Jade had enough. "Stop it! Karkat, I'm going to return you to normal and you have to promise me you will stop fighting with Dave! And Dave, you have to stop teasing him!"

"But can I still talk in general?"

"No!" She barked.

Dave stopped scratching her ears and leaned against one of them in displeasure. Here he was, in the middle of all these damned furries against his will and he couldn't even make jokes about it!

"So how does it feel, Strider, being told you have to shut up? Huh?" 

In response to Karkat's gloating, Dave just flipped up a finger and left it at that.

Lightly, John smiled. "Karkat, you're never going to grow up to be a big, mature bulgelicker if you keep arguing like this," he reasoned.

Dave felt an onslaught of teenage rebellion grip him and, throwing Jade's orders to the wind, dryly commented, "Nobody'd want you to lick their bulge anyway, I bet," under his breath.

Meanwhile, Karkat, who couldn't hear Dave's biting remark from down below Jade, stopped shouting out his tantrum when the crowd of salamanders and other reptiles began making noises and gestures of awe from all around the island.

From the jubilant, chaotic melody of naks and bubbles rose John's incredulous voice. "Wow, the water is suddenly drying up!" He had heard Dave's little jibe at Karkat and said to Jade, who had also heard her tiny passenger, "Dave's comment about bulgelicking and Karkat was so _dry_ that it absorbed all the water! That's amazing!"

Dave smirked. "I'm a fucking wordsmith, what can I say. I can forge a quenched vagabond out of nothing but the sounds from my lips and then I can make him dance a Yiddish folk dance and treat the largest body of liquid around him like the only liquor served at his most hated relative's bat mitzvah. But you can't see these events 'cause it's all the invisible power of language. Mazel Tov."

(The Wayward Vagabond, wherever he was, had a sudden, inexplicable urge to throw a dance party and drink Gamzee's Faygo as an inconceivable wave of thirst had washed over him with no warning. He refrained, but the notion was very tempting. Suggestion is a powerful thing!)

Jade patted her head and hushed the Dave sitting atop it before she set her fingers in a frame around Karkat's general area and returned him to the proportions they had met him in. The grass around him was promoted to all new heights, as well.

While she was at it, she placed a hand on John's shoulder and shrank him back to normal, too. "Thanks for your help, John. I know you won't be able to fit into the mouse-sized doors if you are still… biggified."

"Wow, thanks, Jade! That's really thoughtful!" No sooner had John achieved mousedom that Karkat remembered that he, much like Jade, had an animal alter-ego. And they weren't the only ones.

Karkat was a _cat_ and a prime piece of _mouse_ had been set down in front of him. 

Karkat went after John as if he was a lightning bolt and John an abnormally tall metal pole in the middle of an unusually empty field.

Squeaking and flapping all the way, the mouse-boy hurried along with a feverish drive to stay alive and looked back only to say, "See you later!"


	3. Chapter 3

Dave watched the parade of talking animals as it scattered in and about the now re-emergent geography of the landscape below, chuckling to himself as he saw Karkat's enraged visage burst through the crowd every now and again as the feral cat tried (and failed) to nab the tricky flying mouse. (John was having a time of this game of tag, Dave and Jade were sure- as carefree and haphazard as their friend was, he would not allow any chance to trick and tease such a silly and deserving subject as Karkat Vantas be cut short by such an untimely and frivolous thing like death. In fact, even if John did somehow manage to be killed by the most merciful troll in the universe, Jade suspected that John would brush it off and keep on living because he was having too much fun to realize he was dead- this is a thing that is possible in her dream-wonderland, after all!)

"So," Dave pulled her from her thoughts, "Considering that I made all the water in this joint up and evaporate with my… what's the shitty pun? Right, I made it all evaporate with my "dry comment" like it was an alcoholic single father and I was the goddamn AA, I can talk now and you aren't gonna bitch me out about it, yeah?"

"No, I'm still going to… "bitch you out about it", considering I am a female dog."

"Jade, I didn't mean it like-"

She papped him on the head to reassure him that she was not offended. "Really, Dave, as glad as I am that you were able to solve that problem, it's not a good idea for you to start mouthing off because your metaphors might go a little too far and bad things could happen."

"Bad like how."

"Oh, I've told you before, Dave! The power of suggestion runs rampant here and this world likes to take things literally!" She threw her hands up in the air in exasperation and squirmed beneath her ribbon blindfold. "I want us to have fun here, not spend the whole time trying to outrun, oh, I dunno, kaleidoscopes of… of… of… guy parts because you started going on a tangent about absurd things like that!"

Alarmed at her nervousness, Dave rolled over onto his stomach and massaged circles into her scalp using his hands and feet. "Harley, calm down. There's no way that I actually made the fuckin' ocean of tears (tears shed in mourning for the last of Egbert's ironic sense, thank you very much. Those tears were in no way not manly to the max) dry up by having impeccable sarcastic timing. I mean, I know I'm absolutely incredible in every way, but that's preposterous of you to actually believe that I could do that. Unironically." She gave a little whine of disagreement and he felt her ears shift lower on her coils of ashen hair. "And by the way, where the fuck are we, for real?"

"We're in a little bubble made from my subconscious. And yours, too. That's why the world wants to take everything literally- you are dreaming and you are suggesting a bunch of weird things to our collective subconscious."

"Harley, I'm sorry, but that's bullshit."

"But it's true! And we're here until we wake up, I think."

"When did we even go to sleep? I know I have been wide awake this whole time and this is too bizarre to be a dream."

"I dunno, but I think if we find the rabbit that I was chasing in the real world, it might lead us back into the waking world? Like a weird allegory?"

He slumped, his face in Jade's hair, and breathed deeply. "I refuse to believe that the fact that I am a lucid dreamer is inhibiting my speaking privileges. This is so uncool."

"Hey, Dave?"

"No, really, I'm a font of nigh-priceless verbiage. I can't believe you think I should be banned from my own art."

"Dave,"

"I don't and won't believe it. You're prankin' me, Harley, and it's breaking my heart."

"Daaaaave,"

"Yep. Totally breaking my hea-"

Jade plucked him off of her head and held him at eye level. "Alright, fine, you can talk for a little while! But can you get these ribbons off of my face first? I can't see anything!"

"Oh, right. Um," He made an awkward grab at her face but then thought better of it. "Can you re-grow me so that I, like, can move them?"

She grinned sheepishly. "Yeah, hold on…" she gently sat down and set him down in front of her but left her finger on his tiny chest. "This is so I don't make you the wrong size. I think Karkat's still not as tall as he was before I shrank him!"

"Whatever works," he said, sitting down and holding onto her finger so he could guide it as he grew. "When your hand is at chest level, I'm back to normal."

Slowly, he watched the world around him cease to dwarf him completely and Jade's face grew closer and closer to his eye level and then closer still until their noses were touching and she was practically sitting in his lap- she hadn't taken into account proximity when she'd hatched this little plan.

He tensed up when he realized how near to him she really was and she reacted by scooting forward and placing both of her spread palms on his chest in worry. "Are you okay? Did I do something wrong?"

"Nah, everything's cool," he said, leaning out of the slouch he had adopted prior to getting a face full of Jade.

She smiled in relief. "Okay, I don't know how you twisted these things, so if you need my cooperation to unwrap them, you gotta tell me." For some reason, she seemed to smell sweeter than she had when he was miniature and Dave hesitated before leaning back in and reaching behind her head to untie the square knot John had fastened.

"John's a total boy scout," he muttered, releasing the ends from one another. "Hold on, we wrapped you pretty thoroughly, like a mummy. He paused in mock thought. "You aren't gonna curse me once I release you, right? You haven't turned into some kind of bewitching mummy that's gonna enchant me with some weird Egypt-voodoo," He grinned and neglected the quiet warning in the back of his mind telling him that he might indeed be dreaming and this world might actually take him literally, "once I take off all your dressings? 'Cause stripping is what's going to happen."

But Jade didn't notice his Freudian slip- she was too preoccupied by the overtones of his silly rambling and how warm he was when he was so close to her to look too deeply into it. Absentmindedly, she playfully inched a little closer and giggled. "I am a witch, so maybe! You so sure you want to unveil me?"

Dave, who had officially entered "babbling chumpass" mode, latched onto the bone she threw him (Wait, wasn't she the one who was supposed to be part-dog?) to keep his mind out of the gutter and backpedal away from the disaster he may or may not have set up. "Unveiling? Are we talking brides and weddings? Are we getting married now? Is that the curse?"

He could feel his smooth coolness fading with each word out of his mouth.

Dave was really pulling the rug out from under himself and he nervously twisted the bow around his arm with each rotation it made around Jade's head. He felt her grip his shirt and watched, transfixed, as her buck teeth gnawed on her bottom lip.

Her bright eyes, green globes that glowed like neon lights through the dark night of her hair, blinked open as the last of the fabric fell from her face.

She grinned. "I've put a spell on you, and now you're mine!" she laughed. "You may now, um," her enthusiasm turned timid now that she was aware of exactly how close Dave was. "You may now kiss the bride…"

Quite honestly, she didn't know if she was joking or not.

Dave was completely at a loss for what to say and for once his oversized sunglasses actually helped him look cooler than his bare face would have- his mouth was dumbly agape as if it hadn't gotten the message from his brain that he had ceased talking and he was shamelessly staring.

Slowly, he brought his hands behind her again, but this time he was hoping to rest them on her lower back.

She smelled really, really nice and he still felt himself being pulled closer and closer, even closer than when he'd first been returned to his normal height, like she was planet earth and he was an asteroid being drawn in from space for an unavoidable collision. Languidly, he began to play with the tie on the back of her apron, moving his fingers over the soft fabric and she took the cue to close her eyes and draw herself even nearer to him.

Behind his glasses, Dave also shut his eyes and leaned forward some more, inhaling her through both his mouth and nose and opening his mouth a little more to try and immerse himself even more deeply.

Jade's olfactory senses were vastly more perceptive than Dave's and she could practically taste him, he was so close and his scent so much stronger as a light breeze came through and made him mix with everything because he was the whole world to her now; he was the salt water that had dried in his hair, the trees, the grass, the sunlight, and—

Squirrel?

Jade's eyes shot open and she sprang up out of Dave's arms and over his head in one miraculous movement, like her whole body was a spring ready to be released, and bounded after the little brown-purple blur that had invaded her sphere of scent and momentarily let her inner Becquerel take over.

Dave would have simply fallen forward and caught himself making out with empty air under normal circumstances, but Jade's hair ribbon, which he had coiled around his arm when he had been flubbing all attempts at innocent conversation just moments ago, decided to hold fast to its owner's hair and string him along for the ride. His shaded eyes flew open as he felt his arm nearly get pulled out of its socket.

Suddenly, and with crystal-clear empathy, Dave understood how Karkat felt all of those times he ended up hopelessly encased in the Knight of Time's cape.

"Jade, what the fu-" a rock smacked him on the jaw and she kept running.

The little island they had landed on was now a very steep, wooded (and waterlogged) hill since the ocean had receded and Jade kept descending as fast as she could after whatever had caught her attention, leaving both her dress and Dave's whole body at the mercy of the hand-like branches and scarlet thorns and harsh stones and a variety of other precarious natural inhabitants that populated the sloping landscape.

Dave turned in midair to see that the thing holding Jade's attention was actually little Liv Tyler, the half-rotted rabbit that had led them into this situation in the first place.

Somewhere, Liv had gained a snappy suit and pocket watch, the latter of which trailed out of the suit pockets by a large chain as if mimicking Dave's current status in relation to Jade. (How interesting, that time is always moving with or without you!)

"Jade!"

She barked and sped up after the rabbit, making Dave's collisions that much more frequent.

Finally, after about two mouthfuls of dirt and five rib-smacking encounters with stone and wood later, Dave decided that he'd had enough and pulled back on the same ribbon that had been keeping him captive to even the odds.

Jade herself was undeterred by his yanking, but his adamant tug had helped him lessen the distance between himself and the excited girl and he continued to climb his way closer by wrapping the ribbon around himself more and more.

Finally, as a result of the combined efforts of Dave's inertia, Jade's misstep, and gravity, the girl tripped and hit the ground. Together, she and Dave made the rest of their painful journey down the hill by rolling on top of one another.

After about two rotations, Dave put his arms around Jade to shield her from the worst of the earth's ire. It was agonizing- the hill seemed to go on forever and Dave decided that this was the single most pain-in-the-ass dream he had ever had, and he meant it both literally and figuratively.

His first instinct was to scream at Jade, "WHAT THE FUCK WERE YOU THINKING?" but he knew that she couldn't really help her automatic response to the rabbit and venting all of his aggression onto her was not going to help their situation.

In fact, he could tell that she was desperately trying to shrink the worst of the rocks before they collided with either of them; the smarting pain wasn't as frequent or as intense as it had been moments before.

So instead of yelling at her in anger, he began shouting the most unusual insults he could think of every time he felt the ground abuse him. Pretty soon, Jade joined in and they traded off shouting creative obscenities.

"Fuck a duck!"

"Beaver Damn!"

"Shitting Tiger!"

"Dragon dipshits!"

"Shit fire!"

"Save the fucking matches!"

"None of these are any fucking good!"

"Dave, I'm sorry that I am not as creative as a sailor-"

The next obstacle Dave encountered was especially painful and "Trashy gits" became "Terezi's tits!"

Jade missed her turn because she had to stifle a laugh.

Alliteration and privates were apparently the way to go. "Gamzee's groin!" he tried.

"Dave, ew!" she snorted.

Anything to keep her laughing and to keep him from exploding in uncontrollable wrath at this whole situation. "Karkat's crotch!" Besides, it was kind of fun.

"Obscene!" she laughed.

"Kanaya's cowgirls!"

"Dave!"

"John's janglin'-" He let out as he felt his back slam into a flat, wooden thing that halted their downward spin and sent them a few feet back the way they came, "—jimmies! Augh!"

"Dave, I can't," she gasped for air between laughter and winces as she shifted off of his chest, "I can't believe you just made suggestive innuendoes using our friends!"

"Yeah?" He tried getting up, but quickly decided it would be a better idea not to, "Neither can I."

Although her vision was impaired, she noticed the unhappy flash of teeth that spread across his face when he tried to rise. "You okay?" She sent a cool hand over his bare face (when had he lost his shades?) and helped him sit up. "I can't see that well since I lost my glasses when we met Karkat."

"I'm okay," he lied, "are you?"

"I'm," she paused and he watched her eyes flash like the killing spell in that one series of books that Rose really liked, "I'm pissed, Dave! I completely lost my self-control at the worst possible moment and when you tried to stop me, we ended up careening down a hill!" She huffed and the avada kedavra behind her eyelashes lashed out at him as she got in his face. "And you!" She pushed him in the chest with a staccato pump of her fingers.

Normally, it wouldn't have been enough to hurt him, but the bruises forming beneath his shirt were extremely tender. "Ow! Jade! What the hell-"

"Why did you come after me? I mean, it was nice and I appreciate you being there to make sure I didn't stay in dog-mode forever, but you should have thought a little before you did something so reckless!"

"I was tangled in your fucking ribbon, Jade!"

Dave's initial face-to-face meeting with a rock had left a cut and a nasty bruise that was starting to appear in big blue-purple splotches between his cheek and chin and now that Jade was inches from him, she could see it. Her attitude instantly changed. "Oh, Dave, I'm so sorry. I didn't mean for you to get hurt and then you took the brunt of the rocks and I—the rabbit, I just, I'm sorry! I don't mean to be such a… such a bitch!" Gingerly, she propped him against whatever it was they had hit and her facial expression, which had changed about seven times in the span of thirty seconds, rotated out a few more times before finally settling to go with "tears".

Dammit.

"Look, Jade, don't cry. Whatever piece of you that has that crybaby sprite in there still needs to chill the fuck out, okay? Tears are harbingers of misery and death, just like the arrival of Gamebro magazine or a trailer for an M. Night Shyamalan movie." She snuffled dramatically and he held back the floodgates with a little more Strider charm. "Half of the reason this whole clusterfuck chain of events happened is because I was dumb enough to make a complete tool of myself and repeat the Old Testament's great flood with my tear ducts, so it's partially my own doing. I can't be fucking perfect all the time. It'd make everyone else feel even more inadequate than they already do." Gently, he held up his free hand and knocked against her cheek with his knuckle. "C'mon, we've maxed out on our allotted tears, Harley. So no more of 'em. And you aren't a bitch."

Jade leaned into his hand and he tugged her closer (there better not be another rabbit to distract her this time!) as she blinked away the water behind her eyes. He smiled at her and tried to finish what he'd started at the top of the hill.

Suddenly, she broke away and looked up at the sky. "You know," she wondered, her voice uncharacteristically calm for someone on the verge of crying, "I don't ever remember being this emotional before I godtiered."

Without his glasses, Dave was unable to hide the little scowl that formed on his bruised face.

"I mean, I'm really upset that you got hurt, but I know that crying's not going to help anything! And it's not like I haven't been through worse things!"

Dave frowned a little deeper and didn't notice her flit her eyes back down at him and squint to make out his expression.

"…Are you upset that I'm not crying over you?"

Maybe. "What! No!" Dave spluttered.

"Aw, Dave, do you want my attention?" Her smile grew into a cheeky grin.

"Damn fuck, Harley, I just got my ass handed to me by a bunch of sticks and stones! Is it not possible that I'm upset because I've got bruises placed in such a way that they may-or-may-not be indicative of statutory rape?" The fact that he'd missed his second chance to kiss her was also a pretty big factor in his current negative attitude, but he couldn't just say that.

…And yes, he did want her caring, fawning attentions, even though it made him detest himself to know it. But he couldn't flippantly admit that, either. "I look like a fucking grape popsicle!"

"You're definitely cool enough to be one!" she chirped, but the corners of her mouth turned downwards after. "I really am sorry. I didn't mean to get you hurt." Carefully, she disentangled his hand from her hairbow. "I'll carry you really carefully until we find the rabbit- and if I shrink you and keep you somewhere safe on me, you'll be okay even if I start acting like Bec again."

This was his third chance and he went for it. "Nah, Harley, you don't gotta shrink me. I'm just gonna keep you on a shorter leash," he told her, sitting up and wrapping his fingers around hers.

"How short of one?" she teased.

He hid his soreness as he drew her in. "This short."

And he almost had her, too, until a shrill, excited voice rang through the valley and broke Dave's concentration. "What are you doing? There will be none of that in my yard!"

Strike three.

"Feferi!" Jade cried, moving Dave away. "Oh, gosh, I didn't know you were- we- my friend here is really bruised up. Can you help him with your, um, life-powers?"

Dave turned around to see the highblood girl standing and glaring at him with her hands perched authoritatively on the hips of her enormous hoop skirt, but her face softened when she saw the bruising on his face.

"Glub! You reely did take a beating, didn't you!"

"Oh, Dave, this is Feferi-"

"Yeah, I know Fef. 'Sup?" He decided not to mention the ridiculousness of her getup- her Victorian-style dress was nautical-themed and so she looked like a mermaid who had spent too long in one place- her upper body emerged from a fabric jellyfish and there were so many shells and jewels encrusting the bodice that Dave's mind conjured up an image of barnacles on an old pier.

Her garish makeup and jewelry finished the package and although the overall effect was interesting and exotic, it struck both humans as a bit much. 

"Well first of all, I am lady Feferi and secondly," Feferi pouted, "A whole lot is "up", now! I got so EXCITED that the ocean came back because then my house," she gestured to the wooden thing at Dave's back, "would be back under the sea and I wouldn't feel so homesick. So I got it all ready for a party for all my fish friends but then somebody went and dried it all up! And baitly, we've been having a thief problem in the kingdom, so I am up to my swim bladder in stolen property complaints!" She stomped one of two dainty feet and crossed her arms. "Somefin's just out to un-dampen my spirits and I intend to find out what!"

Jade gave a tight smile and gripped Dave's arm. Keep quiet. "Well, lady Feferi, that's unfortunate. But aren't you the queen here?"

"Huh?" She tilted her goggles to look at Jade. "No, sillygills! I'm the Duchess! Although some do say that I have the glitz and clam-or of one," she displayed her pointy teeth and smoothed her voluminous hair. "But why the glubbing glub are we sitting here when you two look like a couple of fish in a barrel? We need to get you cleaned up!"

Swiftly, she turned and clapped her hands. "Kanaya!"

Said troll came from around the corner of the house, heels clacking. "Yes, my lady?"

"If you would, please aid these two. They are in need of medical attention and a change of clothes." Feferi leaned over as far as her corset would let her and gave Dave a sniff. "And this one needs a bath," she finished, twirling away and gliding off to attend to her business.

Gently, Jade laid a hand on Dave's stomach to remind him not to snark back at their hostess and helped Kanaya bring him to his feet.

"Dammit, I can walk on my own. I'm not a fucking invalid." He withdrew from both girls and, limping, took a few steps forward. C'mon, Strider, walk it off. This is nothing. He straightened himself out and began to walk at a normal pace like he didn't look like a battered piñata beneath his clothes. "So Kanaya," he had to break any silence he could, "What are you? You and Fef over there are the only non-furries I've encountered today, besides myself. Then again, a troll could be some kind of furry subset, but whatever," he concluded with an afterthought.

Kanaya's impeccable diction floated through his ears. "I am my lady's cook and secondary general housekeeper. I ensure that everything goes smoothly on a day-to-day basis and that the household stays immaculate."

"Explains the chef getup, I guess."

"Wow," Jade commented, "that must be quite a chore!" She angled her neck to look at the three-story house next to them. It was a strange mishmash of architectural styles, with the center structure resembling a round-roofed mosque and several illogical European-style towers and chambers hanging off at unusual angles like a coral reef. One of the structures had a staircase on the outside and yet another lacked a whole wall, revealing the rooms inside like a giant dollhouse.

"The house is not as bad as you would think," Kanaya told her, opening the grand, carved mother-of-pearl doors to the Duchess' unusual home for her charges. "The hard part is looking after my lady's housemate. Also," she glanced at Dave, "Are you sure you are alright? There is no shame asking for help if you need it."

"I'm fine. Shut up."

Jade rolled her eyes and gestured to Kanaya to let him suffer through it. Then, she turned to him. "Dave, be nice to Kanaya. She only wants to help you. And what have I told you about talking without thinking?"

"God DAMN, Harley, why is it that I'm the one who always has to shut up? Look, I'll prove to you that not everything I suggest is going to materialize here, okay?" There's no way that the things he said influenced events- the most recent absurd statement he'd made was that he was going to "strip Jade of her dressings" and it hadn't happened.

Jade took a moment to ask Kanaya to show them to the bathroom before she graced Dave with an answer. "Not everything you say is going to materialize, silly! But when you say something, especially as a statement, you increase the risk of our minds latching onto it and making it real. It's like you are manipulating probability. Changing luck, I guess."

"Harley, have you been spending too much time with Terezi and Rose? Because that sounds like Seer of Mind and Light shit."

Jade waved him off and gratefully took several towels from Kanaya and nodded as the kind troll showed the both to the bathroom to learn how to operate the hot water. "Gosh, the bathtub is huge and gleaming!" She marveled. "You do work really hard, Kanaya!

"Perhaps, but bronzed brass is quite low maintenance. It is the mahogany cabinets that prove challenging in this room, especially since the cleaner I use to keep the coral-based floor and countertops white eats away at the stain so it cannot touch it in error."

Dave didn't really care about the quirky finery of the house (especially those paintings of all the sea-dweller troll ancestors lining the halls- what a bunch of cold fish!) and put his fingerprints on the chocolaty-red wood as he leaned against it.

"If you leave your clothes on the bed in the adjoining room, I will launder them and bring you some fresh ones in the meantime." She looked down at Jade appraisingly and tugged on the scarf around her own neck. "Your dress is darling, but tell me, do you insist on wearing so much black?"

Still annoyed, Dave smeared his fingers around on the gleaming surface of the counter while the two space girls chatted. First he wrote his name (in big letters, capitalized and self-important like the truly vain are apt to do) and then wiped it out (because he wasn't quite that much of a douche in earnest.) He then doodled Hella Jeff's face before gracing his masterpiece in hand oils with a nod of approval.

"Thank you so much, Kanaya!" Jade said, smiling. "We don't want to be too much of a burden, so we can take it from here. I'll send Dave if we need anything."

"So I'm the one playing fetch now," the boy breathed.

"I will still come and check on you just in case, but if you need me, I am in the kitchen on the first floor. Follow the sounds of dramatic whimpering if you get lost." And with that, she took her leave.

"Dramatic whimpering?" Jade wondered.

Dave snorted. "Maybe she really hates her job." He kept swirling his fingertips on the countertops, trying to make the entire surface dull down.

"Dave."

"Hn."

"C'mon, please stop acting like such a fuckass!" He didn't answer and saw her wither out of the corner of his eyes. Guilt began to creep up into his stomach- he hated it when she adopted that upset look. "I know you're mad about the whole hill fiasco, and I know…" she reached out and grazed the bruised lump below his eye, "I know it hurts and I'm really, really sorry about that. I didn't…" she shook her head, "but please try to stay positive. Kanaya told me that she had this really cool medicine goop that would make all the bruises go away, so once you get clean, you can use it!"

"Huh," was all he said.

They both knew that his bruises weren't the source of his foul mood and neither were Jade's reminders for him to watch his mouth.

Still, she went that route because Dave would get more upset if she tore down his feigned "coolness" and broadcasted his inner desires. "So I guess you aren't going to say anything for the rest of the adventure, huh?"

His hands hit the wood with a thunk and he snuck a glance at her. "Jade, there is no way in hell or anywhere that the words out of my mouth have consequences that are so immediate and absurd." She noticed that he wasn't so incensed that he would keep his mouth shut. This was a good sign. "John appearing when I mentioned piss and apple juice was a coincidence. A fucking uncanny one, but still just something that he probably set up so that it played out like one of his movies. And the whole thing about the dry comment was just way too weird to be true." And the thing about the clothes that I kind of wanted to happen most certainly didn't, so the power of suggestion is a fucking lie, he thought.

Jade decided it was time to call Dave's bullshit and resolve the issue.

Well, Dave, if you say so. But either way, I am going to take a bath. Which reminds me." She turned on the water and fiddled with the ties of ribbon on her apron- they had gotten tangled with her bow (that ever troublesome thing!) and she couldn't get them undone. "I can't undo my clothes. Dave, will you help me "take off all my dressings?"" Dave felt the color drain from his face and then rise again milliseconds later. "'Cause I need to strip so I can wash myself. So, um, stripping is happening."

The facial expression that she caught him making using the reflection in the mirror was priceless.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Give Eridan a chance, everyone!

The only thing that sounded in the room was the rushing splatter of water as it gathered in the basin of Feferi's bronze seashell-shaped bathtub as Dave stared at Jade as if she had no clothes on.

And if Dave had his way, she wouldn't have any clothes on. He took a tentative step away from the counter he had graphitized and extended his twitching (no, they weren't twitching, he was much too cool for that) fingers and then stopped abruptly like he was suddenly on Lofaf and had frozen solid from temperature shock.

Jade had willfully set up a situation to put him in a position where he appeared to have the upper hand.

Experience taught him that this kind of scenario was prelude to a trap- nobody laid exactly what you wanted out in front of you without keeping something to hold over you in reserves. Rose had wily ways with words, Terezi had her loopholes and technicalities, John had his tricks (with that innocent act being bullet point numero uno on a long list that streamed down from the top of mount Kilamanjaro, spanned the Atlantic ocean, and covered the landmass of North America before finally ending in coils at the windy boy's feet up in his hometown in Washington state), and Bro'd had every moment of Dave's life choreographed before the littlest Strider had even arrived on the scene, complete with backup plans Beta through Omega in case Dave didn't act according to plan Alpha. (And Dave proved to be a Beta kid through and through.)

This scenario smelled fishy in a way that had nothing to do with hostess lady Feferi's affinity for the slimy critters.

"I'm sorry," he spluttered, tearing his hands from their trajectory and over his hair, "I think you don't know what you are saying. Did the spin down the hill damage your brain? Is the dog-girl more dog than girl now? We do not just run around in our birthday suits in front of other people in normal society. Do I need to acclimatize you? Again? I knew you were raised alone on Hellmurder Island, but I didn't know it was a one-gal nudist colony.

Jade rolled her eyes. "Did your cool suddenly heat up or is it just the steam from the bathwater?"

His retort was automatic. "What? No. I have the best personal mojo-ac in the world. Not even the flaming skies of Texas could tear the StrideAir 3000 apart. I do daily maintenance. Still checks out totally cool and nasty fresh."

"Well, sir-extra-fresh-heating-and-air-repair," Jade gestured to her bow again, "Can you please do maintenance on my unruly ribbon?"

He licked his lips- they suddenly felt very dry. "I could, but it'll cost you."

"Dave! I don't want to waste all of Feferi's hot water." Jade knew her little prank had been successful in changing his attitude, but she also knew that she seriously needed his help in untangling her bows.

Dave's stalling was leaving the territory of "amusing" and bordering up against "cowardly" and that was an invasion he did not want to happen!

"Can't have the water crappin' out on ya, too. You'd really be in a bind then. And plumbing isn't my… area." He steeled himself and grabbed the mess of fabric resting on the small of Jade's back, twisting it back and forth like an abstracted puzzle. Jade hadn't been kidding- the ribbon really was embedded in there!

"Ma'am, in the future, I'd recommend not chasing after random rabbits. That's how this mess started and if you keep doing it, I'll have to keep on coming back to…" With a final pull on the fabric, the knot unraveled and exposed the black fabric of her dress. "…service you."

Jade Harley, now free of her apron strings, spun around and grinned. "Guess I'll just have to have you on call, then. I have to chase those rabbits! You're the only, um, "service guy" I trust!" Dave couldn't help but think that the tacky air quotes she put on "service guy" were a little endearing. And dorky. "Thank you for coming out here!"

Nope- he had gotten this far. He was gonna get what he came for. "What? The job's not done. We can't have half-done fixes here at Coolkid Enterprises.

Jade took the loose apron over her head and placed it around Dave's neck. "Oh, I think you've done more than enough. I can't afford any more!" She spun him around and escorted him out the bathroom door.

"So now you want me to wait on you hand and foot? Your own little maid? I got this apron, but do I get a little dress and fishnets and a pair of spicy stiletto heels that match my useless feather duster?" He could hear her snicker as she closed the door behind him. "Ooh la la, mademoiselle! Je sui l'croissant!"

She didn't reply, which was just as well. Dave couldn't actually justify being mad at her for kicking him out while she bathed nor could he hold her accountable for every single failed move he'd tried to make (well, except perhaps the initial one, but that bitch of an issue was too complicated to delve into- acting like a dog wasn't exactly a voluntary response for Jade... most of the time) so he ran his mouth to distract himself and let off his aimless steam.

Lazily, he leaned against the door. "That was all the French I know, by the way, besides the obvious phrase that all guys instinctively know—hey!" He tumbled back as the door suddenly opened behind him and Jade's dress plastered itself to the top part of Dave's face. Quick as a flash, he felt her give him a peck on the cheek before the door clicked shut again and he was left alone with a pile of dirty laundry.

"…So I just wait out here with your underwear? 'Kay." He peeled the garments off his head and lumbered over to an oversized armchair, plopping down into it like he owned it.

After a few seconds, his curiosity got the best of him and he inspected Jade's clothes. Jesus, there was lace and bows all over this thing- possibly even more than he'd seen before (but how was that possible? Had the ribbons multiplied somehow? This world sure was weird!) she had even been wearing a pair of white, frilly bloomers over her underwear. Those things must've been really uncomfortable. And they were bona-fide poofy and ridiculous.

So he naturally did what any true ninja of cool would do and wore them like a hat. For the sake of irony, of course.

Not that Kanaya understood that when she returned and caught him making (ironic) deadpan stares into the nearby mirror with a pair of girl's undergarments on his head.

"I did not realize you had an interest in fashion, Dave. But I must inform you that you are wearing those incorrectly, although they do suit you in the strangest of ways where they are."

Busted. "Yeah, well, I'm a trendsetter."

Luckily, Kanaya was undeterred. "In that case, would you please tell me which of these outfits would better suit Jade? Although the black uniform would flatter her figure and ears, the colorful one is more indicative of her personality." The troll cook held up a maid outfit- complete with heels hanging over the hanger- and a blue dress and apron that reminded Dave of Jade's blue Becquerel garb.

Geez, maid outfits. Alice in Wonderland. Dog ears. Absurd glasses. Buck teeth. Jade Harley was going to be every fetish ever all rolled into one package by the time this adventure was over.

But Dave deftly spearheaded that and denied the maid outfit. "Go with the colors- we all gotta taste the rainbow sometimes," he mumbled, to which Kanaya gave a very sharp look.

Dave had inadvertently brought up the touchy subject of Kanaya's status as a rainbow drinker. Way to offend the helpful girl you had already been acting like a prick to before now, he scolded himself. Smooth, coolkid. Smooth.

But, after what seemed an eternity, Kanaya's perfect fangs poked out of the corners of her mouth as she cracked the awkward silence with a smile and brushed Dave's brusqueness off like it was nothing. "I suppose we do all have to taste the rainbow, indeed!" she laughed.

Crisis averted. Dave used his hand to simultaneously remove the underwear from his head and smooth his hair. "So, uh, whaddaya do for food in these parts, anyway? If you don't mind my asking." If Kanaya was going to play it chill with her trollian vampirism, Dave was going to keep his tact even colder- in the back of the cryogenic freezer, actually, where it would never to be brought out from again. He handed the bloomers to Kanaya and she draped them over her arm.

"Mostly I take turns feeding lightly on the servants and occasionally I make a full meal…" She leaned over, brushed her nose into Dave's neck and whispered, "… from guests."

And then, chuckling, she drew away from him and click-clacked to the bathroom to deliver Jade's clothes so that Dave could pretend like he didn't just panic and internally squawk like a frightened toddler on Halloween. And Dave was a great pretender.

Kanaya returned from the bathroom promptly and flashed her fangs. "Oh, silly, I was only exercising my ability to use the human notion of telling a lie for amusing purposes. It was just a joke." With a twist of her head, she dropped the issue and considered him seriously. "Now, what should we put you in? I doubt you would appreciate the maid outfit. Or would you?" She swiftly held it up to cover him in her line of vision to get the full effect.

No. His damned French maid comment had come to bite him in the ass and Kanaya, of all people, was the mouthpiece. With sharp fangs. "I don't think it goes with my shades. And to defile these babies unironically would be a crime, so why risk it? Let's not "

With a shake of her head, Kanaya lowered the black frock. "It would be adorable, but you are right. It wouldn't suit you, no. Rose would say something pertaining to how you are better at making messes than cleaning them up, if she were here." Despite her already glowing face, she managed to brighten even more. "Or would that be ironic? Yes! I believe I understand this "irony" now!"

"No, look, there is no way I'm going to-"

"Silly boy, you couldn't adventure in the shoes that accompany this dress anyway. And I do believe that human males have some sort of taboo against wearing dresses. Upsetting, since many of them would pull them off beautifully."

Suddenly, Jade leapt out of the bathroom, new blue skirt flying behind her. "Kanaya, thank you so much for the clothes! Can I help pick out Dave's? Please?"

"Now, Harley-"

"Certainly. We can find something while he is cleaning himself. We only require his current clothing so we know his size."

The next thing Dave knew, he was sitting, half-dressed and alone, in the bathroom.

"Crazy space chicks," he muttered, and set the water as high as it would go.

 

\--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Cheshire Karkat Vantas was mad. That damned mouse had flittered about all through the forests of Wonderland with his scrawny tail dragging in front of Karkat's face like some kind of… _orange tubule_ in front of a pathetic _long-eared furbeast_ and Karkathad pelted himself after it without paying any attention to his surroundings. Thanks to John, the poor cat had lost all of his money to the beggar lice lining the fields (whatever human came up with that name clearly never had reason to fear wordplay), tripped over all of the obstacles-pinecones and the occasional toadstool- John had lead him into, and had sliced himself to ribbons on the sharp blades of grass jutting out from the soft, fertile earth that they grew out of.

And looking at his current state in the mirror, Karkat almost wished that "sliced himself to ribbons" meant here the same thing it did in the conventional world- he didn't have a scratch on him, but his clothing was mortifying. He looked like some 1980's (Earth's 1980's, to be specific) prom dress gone horribly, horribly wrong what with all the bows and frills he had acquired. Hell, his _bows_ had bows and he was willing to bet that his tail was like something straight out of a Troll Madame Alexander catalogue.

But that wasn't even the worst part. Sneaky little John had bounded across a lazy river- a river so lazy that it didn't even want to get its swimmers wet- but then, after scooting himself safely across, he'd purposely pissed it off so much that by the time Karkat broke the surface with his claws during his hasty pursuit, the river was raging and working its lethargic self into a froth. It soaked the hydrophobic cat in waves of anger before washing him out.

After that, he had lost John and none of the people he had tried to ask for directions had been useful- Gamzee, particularly. He had been wandering by the river when Karkat had finally spluttered out enough of the water that had wormed its way into his mouth to vocalize clearly (water could _worm_. "Do you know how disgusting that feels on the insides of your protein chute?" he'd screamed at Gamzee.)Upon the inquiry of his moirail(meowrail? Fuck), Gamzee had waved his oversized sleeves, given a slow grin, and said, "I don't motherfuckin' know what you're talkin' about, cat daddy," and sauntered off, leaving a disgruntled Karkat and a gooey green trail of sopor behind him.

So Karkat had become not only disgustingly girly and mouseless, but sopping wet once again.

"If I spend the rest of this fucking adventure looking like I just up and crawled out of the watery side of a fucking fecal waste tunnel, they can just crown me for being the fucking king of all the crazy dumbfucks in the land," he had muttered as he searched for a place to warm and groom himself.

And maybe being king would be okay- Karkat was a natural leader, after all, so if he were leader all of the dumbfucks, he could lead them against the flying mouse, that little pest, John Egbert. _Then_ he'd have his day.

Doggish furbeasts aren't the only ones who have days!

But for the moment, Karkat focused on his immediate needs rather than his wants. He squeezed through the undersized cat door at the back of the Duchess' estate and scuttled to warm himself by the kitchen furnace while he resolved the knots that had collected in his fur and hair. Sometimes, just sometimes, the humiliation of being the lowest of the low- a common house pet- wasn't so bad if it meant he had access to a nice, warm furnace all by his lonesome.

Yes, it was true- Karkat fancied himself to be an independent soul, but the truth was that he was under the Duchess' roof because the cook had taken pity on him and adopted him as her beloved pet.

And honestly, Karkat was grateful for it. He just felt the need to pitch hissy fits about it whenever possible because that is what he did best.

"Part of his charm," as the maid would say.

His thoughts were interrupted by a pitiful whine that could wrench apart the heart and soul, the noise from the only being in all of existence so terrible that it could kill angels drifted to Karkat's eardrums.

"Kar, wwhy don't you come ovver here and play wwith me?"

"Eridan, we've been over this. I'm not an ideal family cat."

"Wwhat are you glubbin' sayin', Kar?"

"All I'm saying is that you've got this awful habit of not letting go of things once you get ahold of them."

Eridan's brows furrowed. "I'll never get better at… this situation if I don't interact wwith otters, Kar. Can't wwe just try?"

Karkat turned to look at Eridan, who was slowly wobbling across the floor, and rolled his eyes. Eridan wasn't being unreasonable, but he could just be so frustrating sometimes.

Especially since, due to recent events, it was nearly impossible to keep the young prince calm when he didn't get what he wanted.

Still, Karkat was willing to try. "Look, Eridan, I don't want you pulling my tail. I've had a bad enough day as it is now that I look like," he spread his mitts and looked down at himself, "Like some kind of soaking wet human baby doll."

"Whale, wwhat's wwrong wwith looking like a baby doll?"

Eridan and Feferi had hit a… rough spot in their relationship and in an especially heated fight, Feferi had told him, "Oooh, Eridan, you are such a _wriggler!"_ Unfortunately, the wonder of this land actualized her insult and Eridan became just that, complete with a ridiculous bonnet and Faygo bottle pacifier that Eridan absolutely hated.

"I know this stupid getup is ridiculous, but it wwasn't my glubbin' choice!" Eridan sniffled.

"No, Eridan, it's really not… that bad. It just isn't my style."

"Wwhatever, Kar, you just don't have time for me. Nobody does. Nautical that I can really blame them." Big, fat tears began to roll down his face.

"Aw, no, Eridan, fuck, I—I-" Karkat pounced over and, embracing Eridan, rocked him back and forth.

"Cod, Kar, I'm sorry I'm being so shellfish and petulant and… I'm tryin' to not cry! I can't glubbin' kelp it! "K-Kar, I c-can't kuh-kuh-kelp it! M-my self-control is that of a-a-a ww-ww-wwriggler!" He inhaled sharply. "Oh, cod, I admitted it! I am a fu-fuh-fuckin' ww-ww-wwriggler!" And it was true. Eridan was not only in the body of an adorable and precocious little grub, but he was forced to deal with the emotional waylays of being a very young child that hadn't learned to contain itself yet.

"If the Duchess hears you crying, she is going to lose it," Karkat chided. And it was true- Feferi was downright terrifying when she was angry and nothing and nobody could ruffle her fins quite like Eridan. She even tried to kick him out after the wriggler "incident". Kanaya took pity on him, though, so Eridan and his newly unruly self remained in the household, making life that much more complicated for everyone. Damn jade troll and her kind nature.

Of course, if it weren't for that same jade troll, Karkat wouldn't be living here either, so in reality(could this really be considered reality? Poor Eridan had been reduced to becoming a wriggler because Feferi had gotten livid with vivid insults, for Sufferer's sake), he didn't really know how to feel about it.

And that only made him angrier.

"Fuck! Eridan! Shut your fucking protein chute and slurp back up those fucking sadness secretions before you are fucking swimming in your own private fishtank of them! I can personally ensure that they stick you and your fucking "big boy" self into the most fucking desolate pond ever, made from your own fucking eyewater if you don't fucking stop!"

Geez, Karkat hated kids. But Eridan wasn't truly to blame and so once Karkat calmed himself, he tried again to hush him.

"Shoosh now, okay? C'mon, Eridan now isn't the time for you to let your fucking face leak. Stop!" At a loss, Karkat sighed and sang, huskily and off-key, the only lullaby he knew:

_"Shoosh, little wiggler, don't say a fucking word._

_The big final glub will never be heard._

_And since that fucking demigod lusus don't sing,_

_Karkat's gonna nab you the black queen's ring._

_And if that fucking hack ring don't shine,_

_It doesn't matter because you're JUST FUCKING FINE!"_

It wasn't working, even with that lovely scream at the end.

Eridan's cries were only getting louder and Karkat could hear footsteps. Shit, it was probably the Dutchess! Well, there was no reason to try and save Eridan's toddler ass now- once Feferi was down there, all spitfire and horrorterror heiress, she'd unleash her wrath upon everything and everyone in her line of sight, not just the unruly baby. Swiftly, he plopped Eridan into the coral playpen at the edge of the kitchen and darted to the shadows on top of the shelves to hide.

Instead of the feared pink pufferfish persecution pounding the door down, though, the calming tones of Kanaya's green burst onto the scene. And she had company.

Jade stepped in and gawked as Kanaya scooped up the crying child and tried, in a much gentler way than Karkat, to shoosh him. Dave, who stumbled in the door last, was the first to speak.

"So are you guys going to tell me that Eridan got turned into a really loud baby through the magical "powers of suggestion" because enough people called him one? Or what? What's the fucking deal here?"

"Yes," Kanaya answered between shooshpaps, "Although it is perhaps due in part to Feferi's witchdom as well as the apparent power of words. As for Aradia and myself, the only hand we have in this is taking care of him."

Dave nodded. "So Aradia is here, too?"

"Well, she should be. She is the other servant and she acts as Lady Feferi's maid. In fact, I had thought she would be back from her errand by now. I had asked to watch over Eridan while I was assisting you, as I thought her departure would be brief," Kanaya replied.

"Oh, no, I'm sorry we were so much trouble! We took up all of your time!" Jade exclaimed.

Dave shook his head and agreed. "Fuck, so am I. This fish freak's wails are damn insufferable."

From his edge of the room, Karkat sneered. Strider sure was a fine one to talk about insufferableness! And that stupid farmboy look he had going on- suspenders, button-up shirt with the top two buttons undone like a fucking douche- made him look even more like a prick than normal. Karkat may not have had a great eye for fashion, but he knew that asshat sunglasses and a deliberately stereotypical hick getup did not mesh.

Karkat knew better than to draw attention to himself by calling Dave out, though. Jade was still part dog and he was still part cat and the last thing anyone needed was a cat-and-dog fight happening to the tune of Eridan's sobs. Besides, Kanaya's calming presence wasn't working. Any minute now and the Lady would come barging in and make a ruckus.

Speak of the devil. He could hear her heels clacking now.

"ERIDAN AMPORA!" She screeched, flying through the doorway and to Kanaya's side. "What do I have to do to make you clam up? I have glubbing told you that if you made another glub that I would glubbing glub glub glub glub glub glub GLUB!" She let out a stream of bubbles that nobody understood besides Eridan, who tried to hide in Kanaya's arms. "Kanaya! Put him down and go tend to Jade and Dave- you know better than to waste your energy on a sea urchin like him!" angrily, she wrenched him out of the chef's arms and screamed louder than Karkat ever could, "Could you reely be any more of a-"

Quickly, Jade stepped in. "Lady Feferi, please don't be so angry with him! He is only a baby, after all, and—"

Feferi stared, eyes wide, from Jade to Dave and then to Kanaya before turning back to Eridan again. "AND you've disturbed our guests! That's just glubbing grouper," she spat, completely unaware that with every fish pun she made, more of the oceanic creatures appeared out of thin air and landed with a splat on the floor. "Every time I need to do somefin, or want to do somefin, you feel the need to just brine and brine about EVERYFIN because you can't ever keep your mouth shut! This is why nobody wants to be aground you!"

"Fef, I-" he tried.

"I don't care! Eridan, I don't care anymore! Prove to me that you aren't a wriggler, like you wanted! Go grow up in the world buoy yourself!"

Kanaya caught Eridan as Feferi dropped him unceremoniously into her arms. "Isn't that too harsh, my lady?" interjected Kanaya.

"It isn't your glubbing place to speak! Kanaya, I am the master of this house!"

"But my lady," Kanaya tried, "please give him another chance. He is not trying to cause you trouble. He is only being everything you make him into!"

She placed Eridan back into the arms of Feferi, who gave him a withering stare. "Convince me," she said flatly.

"Feferi," Eridan tried, chokingly, and found that words escaped him. He used his nubby suction feet to try and embrace her instead.

Unfortunately, the feeling of unwanted suction upon a girl's body does not communicate feelings of sincere affection, even if the suctioning is done completely in innocence.

"Eww! Eridan!" She shrieked. "That was inappropriate and disgusting! Ew! EW!" With a scream, she thrust him away from her and he flew across the room helplessly. From within his dark hiding place, Karkat drew himself up to pounce and catch him, but Jade beat him to it. "You groupered me!" Feferi yelled.

"I didn't mean to!"

"You are repulsive!"

Dave, who had tensed as soon as Eridan had made his way to Jade's person, muttered to Kanaya, "So I guess Eridan's a real pig, huh?"

The ear-piercing squeal that emanated from Jade and sounded through the room drowned out whatever Kanaya was going to say.

Rather, the noise didn't come from Jade, but the baby- which was now a pig- in her arms.

Feferi broke the silence. "WATER-EVER! Eridan, now you have earned your sea legs. You can walk yourself out this door because when I come back down here I don't want to sea you!" She stormed out and the room settled down like seawater after a tornado with the wreckage and dead sea life left to float on the calmed surface.

"So," Dave tried, "We're having this seafood for dinner? Or fresh pork?" Jade smacked him with her shoulder.

"Jade," Kanaya finally said, "May I speak with you outside for a moment?"

"Oh! Ummm, of course!" She handed Eridan to Dave, who collapsed under his weight, and followed Kanaya outside of the kitchen.

The moment the door closed, Karkat pounced on Dave.

Verbally, of course.

"You just couldn't keep your fucking mouth shut, huh? Had to go spewing out stupid comments and try to be funny- you forget that this world actually takes the time to fucking listen to the spew you feel the un-fucking-believable need to release onto it because it doesn't know that nothing out of your gab should ever actually have any weight because you're a fucking dumbshit knave who can't keep to himself _ever!_ "

"Oh my gog, Karkat, I totally forgot that the only way for you to make yourself feel adequate is to cower in the shadows and then assault the shit out of a guy when he's on the ground and totally defenseless," Dave retorted.

"For your information, I was hiding so I could step in and spirit the wriggler Eridan away from the fray if need be, thank you oh so very fucking much! But a hell of a lot of good that did. You turned him into a fucking pot-bellied porkbeast!"

"Wait, so the Aquarius troll, y'know, the water-carrier with the pot on its shoulder, is now literally a pot-carrying creature? Damn," Dave admired his handiwork. "I'm frickin' brilliant."

"Oh, yes, Strider, you are soooo brilliant. I cannot fucking believe how bright you shine, with that big yellow haired head being like such a fucking huge lightbulb with such tiny little thinkpan wiring generating occasional sparks inside. It's like, say, that they didn't even need all that glass! 'Cause it's just full of hot air."

"That ain't how lightbulbs work. They carry currents. They don't make sparks." He crossed his arms and huffed. "And my head better not be lit up like a Christmas tree right now, or so help me, Karkat, I'll literalize you so bad it'll be irreversible."

Karkat wordlessly watched Dave's hair blink twice, red to green, before returning to its natural color and normal brightness."Is "literalize" a legitimate human word?" he managed.

"Hell yes it's a legit word."

"That's fucking stupid."

"Your face is fucking stupid."

Eridan, who had been silently sitting in Dave's lap, wailed, "Cod, THIS is stupid! I realize that the two of you are gettin' your caliginous selvves on, but I am goin' 'ta be rude and ask that wwe all please take a moment to recognize that, in the past three minutes, I have had an emotional breakdown, gotten vverbally troutced by my dear lady Feferi, and been turned into a porkbeast! Is it too much to ask that I be allowwed to wwallow in shellf-pity for a few moments undisturbed? "

"We are not caliginous!" Karkat yelped.

"Sure, what Karkat said. I don't even know what the hell that is. But yeah, Eridan, don't use the word "wallow" while you're a pig. It implies that you wallow inself-pity like a pig in slop."

"Wwhy do you insist on being so insensitive?" Eridan shouted.

"I'd like to know the same thing!" Karkat hissed.

"Okay, look. First- Eridan, I don't actually want to hurt your feelings. I was trying to help you. And as much as I'd love to sit around throw insults like, well, like pigskins, I'm really tired of this horseshittery so let's stop and either have a civil conversation like men or beat each other up like pro bros. So here's me givin' a go at option one: Have any of you seen a really fucking bedraggled toy rabbit running around here?"

"Wwhy should wwe tell you?"

"I'll take the bro approach and strife it out of you otherwise."

"Try it."

 

\--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Kanaya led Jade through the maze of the house, finally stopping in a lavish bedroom full of fantasy posters and wizards.

Rose would have loved it.

Kanaya was busily darting around and gathering things out of drawers in a mad rush. "Will you take Eridan with you?" She finally asked.

"What?"

"I know he can be a bit pompous and weepy sometimes, but he is not all bad."

"Um, but what can we do with him? Dave and I are actually trying to find a way to leave this Wonderland and I don't know if Eridan will want to actually leave like this… as a pig. Although I don't know if he will remain a pig once we leave…" Jade trailed off and considered it.

Suddenly, Kanaya dropped all of the things she had gathered on the giant shell-encrusted bed, whirled around, and pressed her palms together. "Still, will you take him with you for the time being? He has nowhere else to go and by the time you and Dave find the way out, Feferi may not still be angry with him and he can come back. Her moods change… like the sea, after all."

"Well…" Jade looked at her friend's face. "Alright, but-"

A quick hug from the jadeblood to the Jade girl was exchanged. "Thank you. That is one less thing off of my mind."

Idly, Jade wondered if Kanaya was being literal- it was quite possible that she had physical stress hidden under her chef's hat and pressing into her head. She watched as Kanaya swiftly packed the things she had gathered into a bag ("Just a few things, just in case. Eridan can carry them himself,") and took her by the hand and through the coral corridors of Feferi's complex.

The two girls returned to the kitchen to find Eridan, Dave, and Karkat in some kind of tussle- The cat had sunk his claws into Eridan on his way to get to Dave, Eridan was yanking Karkat's tail in retaliation, and Dave was slapping them both in the face with one of the huge grouper Feferi had summoned in her anger.

"Freeze, fuckasses!" Jade barked.

And they did, gaping at her, until Dave gave Karkat one last thwack with the fish and they collapsed into a messy pile of boy, sunglasses, troll-pig, troll-cat, seawater, and grouper.

"I will clean this up," Kanaya sighed. "The three of you, please go bathe so that you do not smell like dead fish."

Jade barked at Karkat and he bolted out the door, suddenly completely eager to douse himself in water yet again.

"Second time I've had to bathe today," Dave grumbled as they left Feferi's mansion.

"Yeah? Well, you need it," Karkat muttered.

"Especially if you are going to be wearing my clothes,"Eridan interjected.

"Why are we taking you two with us, again?"

"For the halibut. Wwhy do you think, Strider? I don't wwanna be going wwith you but I hardly havve an alternative! I would cull to be able to go back to Feferi, pufferably as a troll, but thanks to SOMEBUOY, I can't! "

Karkat, who was keeping a nice ten foot radius from Jade as she eyed him, bristled. " And I'm not going with you, nookmunch. I just happen to be leaving in the same direction."

"So you're gonna "leave in the same direction" with us and lead us to that stuffed rabbit?"

"No. And I have no idea where the rabbit is."

"I think you are lying."

"Look, Strider, I'm not. But I'll tell you this- and this is mostly for Eridan's sake so that he doesn't fucking cull himself from having to be around you for so long. The maid, Aradia? Well, she was sent to go pick something up from the Hatter on the other side of this forest- this one, over here. Not the one at the top of the hill, nookwhiffer—hey, look at me when I'm talkin' to you!" Karkat yowled and leapt in front of Dave.

"GET TO THE POINT, KARKAT. I DON'T WANT TO HAVE TO CHASE YOU," Jade forced out. She could be downright terrifying sometimes. "Sorry," she squeaked, "Eridan's not the only one with an involuntary second nature!"

Dave nonchalantly reached up and scratched her ears. "Okay, Vantas, the dog is muzzled. Spill.

"Aradia went to pick up a few things from the hatter and she is probably either still there or on her way back. By the time you find her, Feferi will probably be over her witchy spell and you can send Eridan home with the maid."

"You don't need to wrigglersit me," Eridan scowled.

"Actually, we probably do since the nakkodiles might eat you," Jade told him. "So what does this have to do with the rabbit?"

"If anyone knows where the rabbit is, it's probably the Hatter. Believe me- he's nearly everywhere."

"If he's got someone everywhere, why don't we just find the "someone" who is here and make them fess up what they know about the rabbit?" Dave snorted. He could play this wordplay game.

Eridan and Karkat gave Dave the most mysterious and unreadable look he'd ever gotten in his life- and since he had been raised by his Bro, that was saying something. "I think you already have," Karkat said, fading into the shadows of the forest until only his teeth were visible.

"Wwhale, I've often seen a Karkat without a grin, but nevver a grin wwithout a Karkat," remarked Eridan.

Dave wasn't so nonchalant. "That was no help at all. Thanks for nothing, Karkitty."

"But Dave, he's doing the best he can!"

"That doesn't mean he's not still a jackass, Jade."

"Well, silly, he's obviously not a jackass. He's a-" she stumbled on the word with a growl- "—cat!"

"I'm pretty sure I could make him into a jackass through the power of suggestion."

"Dave, no!"

"Shut your fucking face orifices and go see the Hatter!" said the teeth before shimmering into nonexistence.


End file.
